Lizabeth Cohen
Professor of American Studies, Harvard University
"A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America"
March 13, 2003

Lizabeth Cohen: I will be building the talk today as much as possible around the illustrations that I have collected for this book. And I do that because first I think it will make it more enjoyable to you but more significantly, I have really rooted this story in the familiar visual images of the post-war period. And I hope that after today some of them may take on new meaning for you. That you will look at family photographs and popular magazine illustrations and so forth, and see larger historical significance in them.

So, let’s start. This is just the cover. I am showing you here really two slides that are two sides of a story that was in Life Magazine on May 5th, 1947. It was a photo essay. And this was the left side of it and this is the right side. So, it is family status must improve. At first take basically it looks like a before and after. You know, you have got…this is the home of Ken and Jean Hemecky, working class people.

He is dressed as a workingman. Jean is in this old kitchen putting coal into this old furnace. Babies playing…dangerously close to it on the floor. And then the after…here they are. He is now dressed in the garb of white-collar worker. You know, the salary man in a sense with a suit. The children are better dressed. You can’t see it terribly well but Jean is standing by the front door with the baby. And then here is Jean down below in this modern up to date kitchen in the ranch house with all the latest appliances.

But when you actually read more closely you discover that this is not really the Hemekys house. It is there…they have been taken to a development to see this new house that Life Magazine and they would very much like to own. And Jean is in a demonstration kitchen in Sterns Department store. Basically this whole photo essay is a set up to illustrate the hopeful message of a twentieth century fund study that the article is really about. And I quote from it, "That to achieve a health and decency standard for everyone by 1960, each US family should acquire in addition to a pleasant roof over it’s head, a vacuum cleaner, washing machines, stove, electric refrigerator, telephone, electric toaster, and such miscellaneous household supplies as matching dishes, silver ware, cooking utensils, tools, cleaning materials, stationary, and post-it stamps." And the caption on the upper right hand corner which there is no way you would be able to read mentions all the modern features which people like Ted and Jean should be able to buy in order to provide full employment and improved living standards for the rest of the nation. End quote.

So I show you this Life photo essay as a document that I think captures quite well the phenomenon that my book is about. The consensus that emerged after WWII, that broad participation in a mass consumption economy was not only the best route to widespread prosperity after a decade and a half of devastating depression and wartime scarcity, but the best vehicle as well to delivering long sought American ideals; democracy and equality.

When Americans like the Hemekys consumed, they were expected to "improve the living standards of the rest of the nation." Thereby making American more egalitarian and democratic society. I have called this conception that reigned from the mid 1940s through the mid 1970s and in many ways is with us still today, a consumer’s republic. Now, this is not a label that people used at the time. But it is my shorthand for what I saw over and over again in all kinds of sources.

Let me tell you a little bit more about this notion of the consumer’s republic. This is an illustration from New Dealer, Robert Nathan’s book called "Mobilizing For Abundance," which was published in 1944. And he puts the consumer at the center of this economic cycle that he is promoting for the post war economy. And so it really demonstrates quite well I think the cycle that he was really promoting of the consumer who buys, and those goods then create jobs, those jobs create more markets and the cycle continues. And consumption was really key to the way this sort of post war economy was visualized.

Now one of the attractions of the consumer’s republic to Americans at the time was the assumption that everybody could benefit without requiring any redistribution of wealth. There was confidence that growth and productivity, income and mass purchasing power would create an ever-expanding pie without shrinking the size of any of its portions. And I am going to show you here three illustrations from Chester Bowles’ sort of blue print for the post war world, which was called "Tomorrow Without Fear," which was published in 1946. Chester Bowles for those of you who don’t know was an advertising man who became head of the price administration during the Second World War. So this is…a three-piece illustration…a bigger piece of a bigger pie, and if we look at the share of the lowest third in national income, as that pie grows, he is doing better and better, happier and happier. A bigger pie and a thicker slice too for that middle third. It starts off in sort of an ordinary white-collar man’s hat…ends up in a top hat. And even a thinner slice from a bigger pie still means more pie for that upper third.

Also this was not just a vision of business and government but labor was very invested in this as well. And this cartoon is from the CIO’s publication, Economic Outlook from March 1946. And it…you can see here it depicts the economy as a machine that worked best when purchasing power is high. So the first…the top, you see the tank is barely isn’t even half full. Production is not great at all. Wages are just a dribble. Profits of course are still okay. We go down below, purchasing power is way up and look what happens. Production is you know, full steam ahead. Wages are into the second and third bucket. And profits are still high if not higher. So that labor became very invested as well in an economy built around dynamic aggregate demand. And this was seen as the key to keeping it’s member employed and living well.

Now, central to the consumer’s republic I argue was the notion of what I call…another one of my words or phrases…purchasers as citizens. Individuals who because they were good consumers, active exercisers of their purchasing power were by definition good citizens as well. Delivering social, political and economic benefits to the nation. So pursuing ones own material desires 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 in the Twentieth Century Fund report that that Life article that I showed you in the beginning was featuring, that was what Life was exhorting the Hemekys and it’s mass readership to become in 1947.

This next image is I sort of consider kind of iconographic image of the consumer’s republic. It is one of my favorite photographs. And actually it is interesting when people sort of look at the book, they are over and over drawn…in fact the jacket designer wanted to put this on the cover. And there were so many reasons why I didn’t think that was a good idea…it is black and white…it didn’t…also I wanted images of the nation and all that…but he was attracted to it as well. But this image of the bride with the coffee pot fits extremely well with a quote I found in a guide to newlyweds that Bride Magazine put out to it’s inquisitive readers. And the quote is, "When you buy the dozens of things that 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." And it is again this link between the individual and the nation.

This concept of the purchaser as citizen had an earlier history that I do investigate in the book, which actually began in the 1930s and then moved into the WWII era. I can’t go into too much detail now but briefly I argue that during the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression, New Deal policy makers and ordinary citizens began to pay much more attention to the importance of consumers. Seeing them as the embodiment of the public interest or general good of the nation. Increasingly they argued that consumers well being required attention for American capitalism and democracy to work. Now, I just note here that historians and myself included have paid much more attention to the organization and recognition of producers than consumers and you know we have looked at the development of successful industrial unions and so forth during the 1930s. And I am saying now that we sort of overlooked the extent to which consumers themselves were also organized.

And this reorientation is visible from Roosevelt on down. Roosevelt justified his new attention to consumers in 1934 as, "A new principle in government. The 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.

Now in the book I also explore how this sort of new attention to consumers didn’t just sort of flow from the top down but really rose from the bottom up. And I look in particular at women and African Americans who become politicized as consumers and what they do about that. This public interest role for consumer is what I call for the thirties the citizen consumer is reinforced during WWII. I show you here an appliance showroom in 1941 to just kind of give you a visual image of what it meant for recovery to start to come in the context of wartime. And you know, people were…finally had money again in their pockets. And they were spending it and they were starting to spend the nation out of Depression. But in the context of wartime, consumer’s desires to spend freely threatened 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 for savings programs and the elaborate structure to monitor and control prices and purchasing for the office of price administration. The OPA as it was called implemented price controls, recycling, scrap and waste drives, victory gardens and so forth. And for participating in overseeing these efforts citizen consumers were empowered and rewarded on the home front. Now much of the management of this wartime home front was done by women who thereby gained new authority I argue as citizen consumers. Not only did they manage their private households to contribute to the war effort, which was a quite demanding undertaking, but they also managed the enormous home front beauracracy that was built around regulating consumption. Women staffed local and state OPA committees and they ran many other consumer regulatory agencies. I show you here a poster Keep the Home Front Pledge. That is not helping any. Okay. This was the centerpiece image of a massive 1943 campaign to promote patriotic consumption and in this campaign as in most of the others, and there were many, the white female consumer represents the patriotic citizen. Again as just a historigrahpical note, that historians have paid a great deal of attention to women’s access to new kinds of industrial jobs in the context of war, the Rosie the Riveter phenomenon that most of you are probably familiar with…but I am stressing here the civic authority that women gained on the home front through their management of consumption. And I will just show you here these are women who are distributing ration coupons in Madison, Wisconsin. This happened, you know, there were constant changes in the structure of the regulation and so there were these occasions when thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of volunteers were needed to redistribute coupons and so forth.

And this is another one of my favorite photographs. These are young girls in a school in Fairfax County, Virginia right here in this state, learning to shop with point stamps. Now this wonderful photograph I think is significant for suggesting not only 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 to contest discrimination as soldiers, as defense workers and as ordinary citizens. Time and again African Americans were kept out of bars, restaurants, hotels, buses, theatres. Even when in military uniform and most shockingly even on military bases. Black civilians also felt victimized by poorly enforced OPA operations in their own neighborhoods, which they couldn’t contest because they were intentionally kept off of OPA boards. This discrimination led to many kinds of protest most of which were unsuccessful. I am told they became more violent and the most dramatic of that was probably the Harlem Riot of 1943. This photograph here shows boys in formal clothes that they had looted during the Harlem Riot of ’43.

Now this riot as 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.

Now accounts of black soldiers wartime experiences are filled with anger at exclusion from sites of public accommodations and in particular sites of consumption because already by wartime many public places were commercial places. This photograph documents a riot investigation at Fort Dix, New Jersey where a gun battle between black and white soldiers over who could use a pay telephone in a sports palace adjacent to the Fort Dix base left one white MP and two black soldiers dead and five black soldiers wounded. This cartoon here which probably appeared in an African American newspaper I found at the Chicago Historical Society is…lamenting the discrimination and discriminatory treatment of returning vet. And it highlights a complaint that I you know, came upon over and over again. That white German POWs were treated better than black soldiers. Can you read that all right? Okay. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP articulated how much blacks rejection in the realm on consumption symbolized for them the full depth of their exclusion from American society. And I quote, "It is pretty grim to have a black boy in uniform get an orientation lecture in the morning and wiping about Nazi bigotry and that same evening be told he can…that 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. And I am referring here not to…not only to the southern movement of the 1950s and the 1960s but to the less often discussed but extremely important civil rights struggle for access to public accommodations that began in northern cities right after the war ended. And in many cases began during the war itself.

With the end of the war there a struggle ensued between promoters of competing views of what this post war society and economy should look like. There were those who wanted a continuation of the government’s hand in regulating the economy. And there were others who wanted to go back to giving the free market free reign. And what I argue is that this consumer’s republic that I introduced to you earlier is ultimately what went out. And that it was implemented and supported by an extensive infrastructure of public and corporate policies.

Now, this new vision of the consumer’s republic promoted it’s own ideal American consumer what I have said I have called the purchaser as citizen…the ideal that was held out to the Hemekys in Life Magazine. And in the consumer’s republic, purchasers who bought more, newer and better were considered good citizens because they kept the engine of mass consumption humming with it’s promise of far reaching social, political and economic rewards for all. Now already during the war the ground had been prepared for the importance of mass consumption to the post war economy. This is a cartoon that appeared in Collier’s Magazine spoofing the shift…the sort of anticipating what would save the economy after the war and you see here you know, the handing over of the carpet sweeper instead of an armament and the slogan is that…the statement at the bottom is do the best you can with them somebody jumped the gun and wreak conversion. Although home building came to a standstill in wartime the plan for the post war era was to solve the enormous housing shortage. Now remember now this is fifteen years of very hard times, Depression and then the war. And we came out of the war with a terrible housing shortage. But the solution that was really imbedded in the consumer’s republic was to solve this crisis with mass building and then purchase of new single family, privately owned homes. And this message was conveyed in many, many ways. There were post war home shows all over the country where home was very clearly a suburban house, single family, detached. There were advertisements like this GE ad…oops…which says, it is a promise and we see what he is drawing. That little house sketched in the sand is a symbol of glorious happy days to come when victory is won. And there were songs and poems and just many, many sort of ways that this message was conveyed to people.

This became a cornerstone in many ways of the consumer’s republic. Private houses in mass suburbia were expected not only to provide needed shelter but also to stimulate the larger demand economy under girding the consumer’s republic…feeding markets for related commodities like cars, appliances and furnishings. One out of every four homes standing in the US in 1960 went up in the 1950s. And by 1960 sixty two percent of Americans could claim that they owned their own homes in contrast to forty four percent in 1940. And that is the biggest jump in homeownership rates ever recorded. For example, by 2000 the homeownership rate has only grown to sixty seven percent from ’62. So that is five percent in forty odd years in contrast to eight percent in twenty years.

The consumer’s republic was supported not just by consumer buying power but also by an elaborate infrastructure of government policies and programs. This was a public-private partnership. These programs included the GI Bill with it’s promised VA mortgages, paid educations, and credit and loans to establish GI’s in business. Highway building to new suburban areas. The mass income tax which had been introduced during the war with it’s mortgage deductions and amendments that were made over time which made it less progressive and more favorable to families headed by traditional male breadwinners. So it starts as fairly progressive tax during the war and with the amendments in ’48 and into the ‘50s becomes less progressive in class terms and also more supportive of a single breadwinner family. And the wider and wider availability of credit was also very important infrastructure for the consumer’s republic.

Now all of the above introduced new rules of the game in post war American society. And sometimes intentionally and other times not, these rules privileged some groups over others. Privileged men over women. Whites over blacks and middle class over the working class. I argue that although the consumer’s republic was intended to make possible a more democratic and egalitarian American society, in entrusting so much to a government supported but nonetheless private marketplace, it contributed to new kinds of inequalities and stratifications.

Let’s take gender as an example. This is another Life cover as you can see for 1953 which documents the importance of homebuilding to America’s economic prosperity…the American and his economy and then Family buys best $15,000 house. But it also I think demonstrates the social empowerment of the male breadwinner that was imbedded in this economic vision. And I would argue that the consumer’s republic subverted in many ways the civic authority that women had gained as consumers on the home front of WWII. It also deprived women of dominant power over consumption in the household. As consumption became viewed as a more critical part of the economy increasingly it was considered a male responsibility. And you see this very directly in labor unions where issues of consumption were sort of passed over to the auxiliaries during the thirties. That was considered sort of women’s concern. Once you become…you know, go through the war and into the post war period, consumption becomes very central to the concerns of you know the sort of heart of the labor movement.

The GI bill was a critical aspect of the consumer’s republic infrastructure. And it gave more advantages to men over women. In granting those who served in the military in WWII easier access to homeownership, to higher education, to credit and to loans to start a business, men were favored over women who served in the military much less than men…I think they were about two percent of military personnel…and when they did serve, they were not offered the same benefits. And that continued for quite a while you know, after the war and then they were finally some efforts to sort of equalize those benefits.

Or take racial discrimination to which the GI bill also contributed. Due in large part to the way the program was implemented and this came as a surprise to me…I just when I started this research, I just assumed that you said you wanted education, you said you wanted a home, you got the check in the mail. It didn’t work that way. The money was channeled through existing institutions like colleges, banks and so forth. So you had…people who applied had to be qualified by those institutions. And many of the same kind of prejudices came into play. Not surprisingly African Americans were often denied the mortgages and college entrances that they applied for. The NAACP papers are filled with letters of complaint from Vets. This here is a photograph of a staff sergeant explaining the GI Bill of Rights to quartermaster trucking company in Italy. So this is the official photograph. This is the ideal. And this is more the reality. This is a black Vet group…the Negro Allied Veterans of America preparing for a protest march to point out many of the you know, what they considered unfair conditions including the inadequate supply of decent homes for black vets.

I argue however that the consumer’s republic’s promise of equal access to consumption and supposedly free markets did have some positive effects as well. Particularly in mobilizing black Americans to launch the post war Civil Rights movement. As blacks continued to face discrimination in public accommodations which were often commercial settings by this period, their sense of entitlement to participate in free consumer markets propelled them to protest exclusion from discriminating hotels, restaurants, theatres, skating rinks, swimming pools and the like.