June 25, 2003

Dennis Connors, Courtesy Knopf Publishers

By Lizabeth Cohen

Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department of Harvard University. She is the author of A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (January 2003). She spoke at the Miller Center’s American Political Development colloquium on January 23, 2002.

The story of postwar America is rooted in familiar visual images—be they family photographs or popular magazine illustrations from the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. A prime example is the photo essay that appeared in Life magazine on May 5, 1947, entitled "Family Status Must Improve—It Should Buy More for Itself to Better the Living of Others." The first page showed the "before," the old rickety home of Ted and Jeanne Hemeke, who were clearly working-class people. Ted is dressed as a workingman. Jeanne is toiling in an old kitchen, shoveling coal into an antique furnace. Their baby is playing on the floor, dangerously close to it. The next page shows the "after": Ted is now dressed in a suit, the garb of a white-collar worker. The children are also better dressed. Jeanne, holding the baby safely in her arms, awaits Ted’s return from work at the front doorway of modern ranch-style house. And then, in the next photo, Jeanne is in an up-to-date kitchen equipped with all the latest appliances.

But when you read the article more closely, you discover that the "after" photographs were not actually shot at the Hemeke’s house. Rather, the Hemekes were taken to visit a house in a new tract development, and Jeanne was actually working in a demonstration kitchen in Stern’s Department Store nearby. Basically, the entire photo essay was a setup to illustrate the hopeful message of a Twentieth-Century Fund study. The study said, "To achieve a health and decency standard for everyone by 1960, each U.S. family should acquire, in addition to a pleasant roof over its head, a vacuum cleaner, washing machine, stove, electric refrigerator, telephone, electric toaster, and such miscellaneous household supplies as matching dishes, silverware, cooking utensils, tools, cleaning materials, stationery, and postage stamps." The message continues in a photo caption which emphasizes "all the modern features which people like Ted and Jeanne should be able to buy in order to provide full employment and improved living standards for the rest of the nation."

As the Life essay captures, there was a developing consensus after World War II that broad participation in a mass consumption economy was, not only the best route to widespread prosperity after 15 years of devastating depression and wartime scarcity, but the best vehicle as well to deliver long-sought American ideals of greater democracy and equality. When Americans like the Hemekes consumed, they were expected to "improve the living standards of the rest of the nation," thereby making America a more egalitarian and democratic society. This "Consumers’ Republic," as I have labeled it, reigned from the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s and, in many ways, is still with us today.

In his 1944 book, Mobilizing for Abundance, New Dealer Robert Nathan put the consumer at the center of an economic cycle that he promoted as the route to recovery for the postwar economy. In this cycle, the consumer buys goods, the manufacture of which creates jobs, those jobs create more markets, and the cycle continues. Thus, in Nathan’s and many others’ views, mass consumption was key to a vibrant postwar economy. And it was all the more attractive a vision to Americans at the time because it assumed that everyone would benefit without requiring any redistribution of wealth. There was confidence that growth in productivity, income, and mass purchasing power would create an ever-expanding "pie" that would result in better living standards for all. Former head of the wartime Office of Price Administration Chester Bowles conveyed this expectation in his 1946 blueprint for the postwar world, called Tomorrow without Fear. A former advertising man, Bowles included in his book a three-part cartoon illustrating how greater purchasing power would benefit everyone. As the pie grew in size, the "lowest third in the national income" got "a bigger piece of a bigger pie," "the middle third" got "a bigger pie and a thicker slice, too," and even the "top third" got "a thinner slice from a bigger pie," which "still means more pie." Not only business and government, but labor became very invested in this ideal, seeing expanding purchasing power as the ticket to more stable jobs and growing income for its members.

Courtesy National Archives

African-American school girls learn to shop with point stamps, Fairfax County, Virginia.

Central to the Consumers’ Republic was the concept of what I call "purchasers as citizens," individuals who, because they were active exercisers of their purchasing power, were, by definition, good citizens as well, delivering social, political, and economic benefits to the nation. Pursuing one’s own material desires, then, was not a personal indulgence but rather for the good of the nation. The role of purchaser as citizen in essence was what Life magazine was exhorting the Hemekes and its mass readership to become in 1947. Nothing says it more clearly than Bride’s magazine’s advice to its readers in its Handbook for Newlyweds published in the 1950s: "When you buy the dozens of things you never bought or even thought of before, you are helping to build greater security for the industries of this country. What you buy and how you buy it is very vital to your new life and to our whole American way of living."

This concept of the purchaser as citizen predates World War II, although it came into its own then. In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, New Deal policymakers and ordinary citizens began to pay much more attention to the importance of consumers, seeing them as the embodiment of the public interest or the general good of the nation. Increasingly, they argued that consumers’ well-being required attention for American capitalism and democracy to work.

Historians have paid much more attention to the organization and recognition of producers than consumers. We have looked at the development of successful industrial unions in the 1930s and overlooked the extent to which consumers were also organized. Yet this reorientation is visible from President Franklin Roosevelt on down. Roosevelt justified his new attention to consumers in 1934 as "a new principle in government—that consumers have the right to have their interests represented in the formulation of government policy." Never before had the particular problems of consumers been so thoroughly and unequivocally accepted as the direct responsibility of government. The willingness to fulfill that responsibility was, in essence, an extension and amplification of the meaning and content of democratic government. This new attention to consumers, moreover, did not just flow from the top down, but also rose from the bottom up. In particular, women and African Americans became politicized as consumers before, during, and just after World War II.

This public interest in the citizen consumer was reinforced during World War II. In 1941, the economy was beginning to recover just as the United States was about to enter the war. People finally had money in their pockets again, and they were starting to spend the nation out of depression. But in the context of wartime, consumers’ desire to spend freely threatened to cause dangerous inflation and shortages, particularly as more and more products were needed for military use. So the government implemented new policies to cap consumer spending: the mass income tax, forced savings programs, and an elaborate structure to monitor and control prices and purchasing through the Office of Price Administration (OPA). The OPA implemented price controls, recycling, scrap and waste drives, victory gardens, and other measures to promote economy. For participating and overseeing these efforts, citizen consumers were empowered and rewarded on the home front.

Much of the management of the home front was done by women, who thereby gained new authority as citizen consumers. Not only did they manage their private households to contribute to the war effort, which was a demanding undertaking in itself, but they also managed the enormous home front bureaucracy that was built around regulating consumption. Women staffed local and state OPA committees and ran many other consumer regulatory agencies, heeding the government posters exhorting them to "Keep the home front pledge." In this campaign, as in most of the others—and there were many—the white female consumer represented the patriotic citizen.

Support for price controls did not come only from whites. One of my favorite photographs from this era depicts young African-American girls in a school in Fairfax County, Virginia, learning to shop with point stamps. This wonderful photograph is significant for not only suggesting that young African-American girls were interested in learning more about the wartime consumer economy because they were female, but also because they were black. As the realm of consumption became pivotal to the war effort, consumption became a crucial arena for African Americans to experience and contest discrimination as soldiers, as defense workers, and as ordinary citizens.

Time and again African Americans were kept out of bars, restaurants, hotels, buses, theaters, even when in military uniform and, perhaps most offensively, even on military bases. Black civilians also felt victimized by the poor enforcement of OPA regulations in their neighborhoods, which they could not contest because they were intentionally kept off of OPA boards. This discrimination led to many kinds of protests, most of which were unsuccessful until they became more violent. The most dramatic explosion was the Harlem Riot of 1943. This riot, like others that happened during the war, had many causes, but wartime shortages and frustrations over discrimination by the OPA were critical factors. For example, only after the riot did the OPA institute much more stringent supervision of price controls in Harlem stores and make Harlem a district covered by rent control.

Courtesy Library of Congress

Staff Sergeant Herbert Ellison explains the GI Bill of Rights to a quartermaster trucking company in Italy during World War II.

Accounts of black soldiers’ wartime experiences were filled with anger at their exclusion from sites of public accommodations, which meant in many cases sites of consumption, because by the 1940s many public places were commercial places. African Americans even felt that white German POWs were more welcome at many sites than black soldiers. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP articulated how much blacks’ rejection in the realm of consumption symbolized for them the full depth of their exclusion from American society: "It is pretty grim to have a black boy in uniform get an orientation lecture in the morning on wiping out Nazi bigotry and that same evening be told he can buy a soft drink only in the colored post exchange." In many ways the experience of blacks as would-be consumers during the war set the ground for the civil rights movement that would immediately follow the war. I am referring not only to the southern movement of the 1950s and 1960s but to the less-often discussed but extremely important civil rights struggle for access to public accommodations that began in northern cities as the war was ending.
With the end of World War II, a struggle ensued between promoters of competing views of what postwar society and economy should look like. Some wanted a continuation of the government’s hand in regulating the economy, and others wanted to return to a free market system. Ultimately, the vision of the Consumers’ Republic won out, implemented and supported by an extensive infrastructure of public and corporate policies.

This new vision of the Consumers’ Republic promoted its own ideal American consumer—the purchaser as citizen—the ideal that was held out to the Hemekes in Life magazine. In the Consumers’ Republic, purchasers who bought more, newer, and better were considered good citizens because they kept the engine of mass consumption humming with its promise of far-reaching social, political, and economic rewards for all.

Home building, at a standstill during the war, became the foundation of the postwar mass consumption economy, as the nation faced an enormous housing shortage that had worsened over 15 years of hard times. The advertised solution was the mass building and sale of new, single-family, privately owned homes. There were "Postwar Home Shows" all over the country where "home" was very clearly promoted as a detached suburban house. Magazines abounded with advertisements like one from General Electric, which depicted a GI and his girl sitting on a bench, drawing a house on the ground with a stick: "That little house sketched in the sand is a symbol of glorious happy days to come—when victory is won."

As suburbia became a cornerstone of the Consumers’ Republic, private houses were expected not only to provide needed shelter but also to stimulate the larger demand economy undergirding the Consumers’ Republic, feeding markets for related commodities like cars, appliances, and furnishings. One out of every four homes standing in the U.S. in 1960 went up in the 1950s. By 1960, 62 percent of Americans could claim that they owned their own homes, in contrast to 44 percent in 1940—the biggest jump in home ownership rates ever recorded. In contrast, from 1960 to 2000, the rate of home ownership only grew an additional 5 percent, to 67 percent.

The Consumers’ Republic was supported not just by consumer buying power but also by an elaborate infrastructure of government policies and programs. These programs included the GI Bill with its promised Veterans Administration mortgages, paid educations, and credit and loans to establish GIs in business; highway building to new suburban areas; and the mass income tax. The income tax began as a fairly progressive tax during the war, but with the amendments of 1948 and the 1950s, it became less progressive in class terms and also more supportive of families headed by a single breadwinner (usually male). Greater availability of credit was also a very important part of the Consumers’ Republic’s infrastructure.

Sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, the new rules of the game in postwar American society favored some people over others. It favored men over women, whites over blacks, and the middle class over the working class. Although the Consumers’ Republic was intended to make possible a more democratic and egalitarian society, by entrusting so much to a government-supported but nonetheless private marketplace, it contributed to new kinds of inequalities and stratifications.

Courtesy Carpenter Center Photography Collection, Harvard University

A bride’s acquisition of a new electric coffeepot promised to benefit the public good.

Gender distinctions provide an example. The GI Bill, a critical aspect of the Consumers’ Republic’s infrastructure, favored men over women by granting those who served in the military in World War II easier access to home ownership, to higher education, to credit, and to loans to start a business. Even women who served in the military—about 2 percent of military personnel—were not offered the same benefits as male veterans.

Due in large part to the way the program was implemented, the GI Bill inadvertently also contributed to racial discrimination. Collecting on the promise of the GI Bill was not as simple as saying you wanted to attend school or buy a home and then receiving the check in the mail. Rather, the money was channeled through existing institutions like colleges and banks. Applicants had to be qualified by those institutions, and not surprisingly, African Americans were often denied the mortgages and college entrances for which they applied. The NAACP papers are filled with complaints from black veterans.

The Consumers’ Republic’s promise of equal access to consumption in supposedly free markets thus played a part in mobilizing African Americans to launch the postwar civil rights movement. As blacks continued to face discrimination in public accommodations, their sense of entitlement to participate in free consumer markets propelled them to protest exclusion from discriminating hotels, restaurants, theaters, skating rinks, and swimming pools.

The infrastructure undergirding the Consumers’ Republic also created what I call a "landscape of mass consumption." Suburban northern New Jersey offers a particularly revealing case. In the 1950s, vegetable fields and farms in the area were transformed into mass suburbia almost overnight, helping to make New Jersey the quintessential postwar suburban state. New Jersey also had a very activist and progressive State Supreme Court in the postwar period that addressed many of the social consequences resulting from the new landscape of mass consumption.

In the Mount Laurel decisions, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled on the quantity of affordable housing communities were required to provide as suburban towns took on very distinctive socioeconomic profiles. The Court also made decisions on the uniformity of education spending within the state, as cities and towns varied dramatically in wealth, giving them unequal property tax bases and hence unequal amounts of money to spend. Finally, the Court made decisions about how much free speech and assembly a privately owned shopping center was obligated to recognize if it functioned as the town center of a suburban area.

The residential landscape that emerged is familiar to millions of baby boomers: suburban tract housing. Widespread home ownership led to increased commodification of the home and increased attention to property values. Whole newly built communities emerged, pegged at a certain level of the housing market, and thus occupied a set place in the hierarchy of suburban communities.

While suburbia may have become increasingly diverse overall as time went on, it also became increasingly segmented socioeconomically, with, on the one end, "cops and firemen" suburbs, as they were often called, and, at the other end, upper middle-class ones. The evolution of Levittown, Long Island, conformed to this pattern. It went from being cross-class in 1950 to uniformly lower middle class in 1960, as professionals and other middle-class residents moved on to more affluent suburbs. The same dynamic occurred elsewhere across the country. Upward mobility in home buying became the norm, as a house became a commodity to be traded up like the car.

The nature of this suburbanization process led to several outcomes that worked against the equality hoped for in the Consumers’ Republic. Suburban residents became very invested in their local communities, and they worked hard to keep control over services like public schools, insisting on funding them through local property taxes. Great inequalities in services across communities resulted.

When historians think about the role of government during this period, they tend to focus on the expansion of the federal government, often forgetting how critical local governments continued to be. While there were always different socioeconomic neighborhoods within cities, such neighborhoods still had to negotiate within a single municipality with a single set of institutions and services. When the socioeconomic variations that had existed within one city began to operate on the scale of different towns and were no longer under one government, the results were enormous inequalities in wealth, resources, and access to vehicles of upward mobility such as schools.

"Building the American City, A Report to Congress and the President" put it succinctly in 1968: "Residential segregation by income class has been fostered by federal regulations, restrictive codes, and fiscal zoning. Developers catering to buyers of $50,000 to $100,000 homes, as in this small plat with 29 swimming pools, can neglect the need for balanced communities."

Suburban segmentation became even more inflexible around race. Formidable racial barriers in suburbia were erected through mortgage lending, beginning in the 1930s with the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and then perpetuated after the war by government VA and FHA loans. Realtor steering and outright discrimination and exclusion also contributed. In 1957, Levittown, Pennsylvania, was featured in Life—not as an idealized image of suburbia, but this time in photos and stories depicting crowds of neighbors protesting, and police protecting, William and Daisy Myers and their family, the first blacks to move into Levittown.

The drama repeated itself in Teaneck, New Jersey, where the community became extremely divided between those who capitulated to realtors’ calls to "sell while the selling is good," when blacks from neighboring Englewood began moving over the border, and others who sought to convince their white neighbors that it was possible to preserve a "stable" neighborhood "where home values do not decrease because of integration." The increasing importance of property values to people whose major asset was now their home intensified resistance to racial integration. One neighbor of the Myers in Levittown, for example, told a Life reporter, speaking of Mr. Myers, "He’s probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house."

Regional shopping centers were another prominent feature of suburbia that emerged in the late 1950s. They were entirely oriented around consumption, although they tried to legitimize themselves as the true public space of these new suburbs. Developers of these shopping centers claimed that they were creating a better alternative to downtowns, perfecting traditional town centers by more scientifically selecting and placing stores, providing ample parking, policing effectively, and ensuring the efficient delivery of goods and services.

When new suburbs were carved out of farm fields, few community centers existed. Where there were long-standing market towns nearby, such as Hackensack, New Jersey, the opening of new shopping centers like the Bergen Mall and Garden State Plaza often hurt their economies, just as small towns are affected today when big box stores are built nearby. But if these shopping centers claimed to be the new, accessible public space, the reality was often quite different, as they were deeply segmented by class and race, much as neighboring residential communities were.

Very quickly, shopping centers took on differentiated market identities. Some became upscale, others discount, while most aimed at a middle, middle-class market. They were also set up for people to drive to them, requiring consumers to have a car. In the 1950s and 1960s, many people did not have cars, or if they did, they had only one, which was often used by the male breadwinner to get to work. There were some buses, but routes were carefully planned to bring people from suburban communities, particularly carless and non-driving women, to the shopping centers, not residents of nearby cities. At the shopping centers, privately hired police were quite visible and active as well, weeding out those considered "undesirables," often because they were too young and unruly or too poor and black. Significantly, most states allowed the private owners of these shopping centers to limit free speech on their premises. New Jersey was among the very few exceptions, as its State Supreme Court ruled that a certain amount of free speech must be allowed because shopping centers functioned as the new town centers of suburbia, even if they were privately owned.

There was also an important gender dimension to this new public space of the shopping center. In some ways, centers’ physical space was designed for women. There were extra-wide parking spots for the new women drivers of the 1950s, and lockers were provided for ladies’ wraps. But in keeping with the postwar orientation to family consumption, women were expected to orchestrate but were not empowered to fully control their family’s buying. Macy’s annual report for 1957 typically celebrated "the togetherness of family shopping" on the occasion of the opening of its new Bamberger’s store in the Garden State Plaza.

Perhaps one of the most important ways that women were at a disadvantage in this new configuration of consumption was that suburban shopping centers were tied closely to the postwar credit revolution. Until equal credit legislation passed in the 1970s, credit always had to be in the name of a woman’s husband, whether she was married, divorced, or widowed. She could not get credit in her own name.

Shopping centers also limited women’s independence as producers, as suburban stores depended on part-time female sales help living nearby, to whom they offered low pay with few benefits. The hiring of suburban housewives was also part of department stores’ attack on the retail clerks’ unions that had successfully organized their downtown stores.

The landscape of mass consumption, institutionalized in new kinds of residential communities and commercial centers, revealed a contradiction between an ideal of a more democratic "mass" consumption, "mass" marketing, and "mass" suburbia and a reality of segmentation, and even in some cases inequality, created through the playing out of government infrastructures and market-oriented, and increasingly stratified, residential patterns and commercial structures.

This paradox was reinforced in another way, through the mass market itself.

The Consumers’ Republic was originally committed to developing and selling to mass markets. As Chester Bowles, head of the OPA, wrote in 1945, "We cannot have full employment and full production without true mass markets. Our old ideas of where the markets are all go out the window. We’ve learned that the janitor’s appetite for a sirloin steak is as profitable as the banker’s." But by the late 1950s advertisers and marketers began to fear the saturation of mass markets. They argued there were more profits to be made by segmenting markets and selling different products to differentiated markets than by selling one product to everyone.

Over time, segmentation became increasingly complex, making distinctions along lines of gender, class, age, race, and ethnicity. This segmentation process was not all driven from the top. Advertisers also responded to consumers’ own articulated social identities, particularly during and after the 1960s. The feminist market is a good example. At first, advertisers felt under attack by the feminist movement and its mouthpieces like the National Organization for Women, which picketed and boycotted them for their exploitation of women. However, at a certain point—as can be seen clearly in Advertising Age and other trade journals—they woke up and realized, "Wait a minute. This is a new market we can sell to!" Soon advertisements aimed at professional and liberated women abounded in the popular press, aimed at selling them everything from life insurance to air travel.

Increasingly over the postwar period, marketing techniques moved from Madison Avenue and corporate boardrooms to political parties and campaign headquarters. Rather than conveying the same message to all constituents, political candidates increasingly tailored different messages to different voters, undermining recognition of any common ground or the necessary trade-offs between interest groups. With the rise of direct mail campaigning in the 1960s, targeting voters became even more sophisticated and successful.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, a consumer movement arose that resembled the earlier movement of the 1930s but was far wider in its ambitions and impact. A wide range of consumer protection legislation was passed by Congress and was carried out by newly strengthened and/or created federal regulatory agencies. But with the economic recession of the mid-1970s, that movement collapsed, and efforts to dismantle its accomplishments grew as politicians linked the new, sometimes costly demands of the consumer movement to the nation’s economic troubles. Most notably, privatization and deregulation—first trumpeted by President Jimmy Carter and then extensively implemented by President Ronald Reagan—became the ruling principles of the day.

Nevertheless, the importance of protecting the consumers’ interests had become so widely accepted by this time that many of the political strategies of the late 1970s and 1980s to undermine consumer rights were defended as serving the interests of consumers, although more narrowly defined in terms of financial well-being. The result was a shift in the relationship of citizens and their government itself, or what I call the "consumerization of the republic." Citizens were now encouraged to think of themselves as customers of government, bringing a consumer mentality to bear in judging government services like other purchased goods, by the personal benefit they derived from them.

As the Consumers’ Republic evolved into the consumerization of the republic, politicians and voters were quick to reject policies they felt yielded an inadequate personal return on their investment. They struck down policies that gave others "something for nothing"—whether generous welfare benefits for those without work, universal health coverage for the uninsured, or estate taxes that transferred wealth away from inheritors. Thus, the message of the Consumers’ Republic at its most idealistic—that the interests of individual purchasers as citizens and of the nation were one and the same—evolved into an expectation that "what’s best for me is what’s best for America."

Undeniably, the Consumers’ Republic led the nation overall to great economic prosperity from 1945 to 1975, and it even encouraged some popular movements to widen the beneficiaries of that prosperity, such as the drive for civil rights and the rise of consumer politics. But by entrusting the mission to deliver democracy and equality, along with prosperity, to private markets in postwar America, we too often allowed the exigencies of those markets to hold sway. As a result, the severe economic and social inequalities that characterize America at the start of the twenty-first century stem not from the recent recession, nor even from Reagan’s 1980s or the stagflation of the 1970s, but from the very way that the nation achieved its prosperity in the golden postwar years.