Cohen Takes On Consumerism

Popular imagination regards the 1950s as an era of stability, prosperity and equality. But Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen has a mission to dispel these conventional, nostalgic notions about the postwar years.

With her audience of eager graduate students and baby boomers cozily nestled between parted stacks, Cohen braved last Friday’s snowstorm to speak about her latest book, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. Even C-SPAN was undeterred by the weather, arriving in full force with cameras and boom microphones to hear Cohen kick off the Harvard Book Store’s spring “Friday Forum” series.

Cohen, who is also head tutor of the History department, said she wanted to continue to answer questions raised in her previous book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. She was interested in determining the links between consumption and the Civil Rights movement, as well as examining more critically the shift from small town centers to shopping malls.

In the book, she writes of growing up in the 1950s, and her a personal story is held up against the wider analysis of the era.

A Consumers’ Republic begins by describing Cohen’s middle class family in New Jersey, which she describes as the quintessential suburban state.

“I am in many ways a character in this book,” Cohen says, holding up a blown-up black and white photograph from her personal album. Such photographs appearing throughout the book provide a visual orientation to the era. Visuals like advertisements and billboards were crucial contributors to the mass consumption of the post-war decades, Cohen says.

Despite the personal photographs in its pages and the retro 1950s Chrysler DeSoto on the book’s cover, Cohen emphasizes that such images and symbols are representative of larger social, economic, political and cultural changes.

“This story is not just about more cars, air conditioning, and computers,” Cohen says. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”

According to Cohen, the message that one should enage in self-indulgence and materialism to help the country was conveyed to a weary post-war public.

Policy makers at the time believed that such consumption would not only spur the economy but create a more egalitarian society as well, Cohen says. But they didn’t realize that as consumption became synonymous with patriotism, divisions along the lines of class, race and gender persisted and were exacerbated in some cases.

With regard to class, Cohen says that suburban sprawl wasn’t the same for everyone, distinguishing between “cop and fireman” suburbs and “upscale” suburbs to counter the false belief that America had one huge, equal middle class.

Cohen also argues that women were not active participants in the new consumer’s republic. By pointing out that women were denied credit until the mid-1970s, Cohen created a more complicated picture of an era of good but unfulfilled intentions.

Even more apparent was the exclusion of racial minorities from suburban neighborhoods.

Cohen cites a Life Magazine reporter who wrote about the Myers family, the first black family in a Levittown, Pa. neighborhood, as an example of the resistance to racial integration of consumption. The reporter captured a telling remark from a neighbor: “He’s probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my home.”

The consumers’ republic has evolved into the “consumerization of the republic,” Cohen says, a state in which everything is valued in terms of personal returns, and where everyone asks, “‘Am I getting my money’s worth?’ not ‘Will it benefit the country as a whole?’”

In the book’s epilogue, Cohen cites the nation’s reluctance—one that nearly qualifies as selfishness—to provide generous welfare benefits and universal health care as evidence that Americans won’t give others what they call “something for nothing.”

She begins to offer broad policy considerations, such as affordable housing in well-off suburbs and equalized school spending.

Last Friday she returned to these issues, arguing that the belief in “what’s best for me is what’s best for America” needs to change.

Cohen told The Crimson of her apprehension that undergraduates studying the post-war era, and particularly the 1950s, will over-idealize the period.

Her job is “getting students to recognize that it is more complicated than that.”

—Staff writer Lisa M. Puskarcik can be reached at puskarc@fas.harvard.edu.