A Consumer's Republic by Lizabeth Cohen

...It's not simply that this social democratic alternative is more imagined than real...

...Cohen's heart is in the right place, but the most successful populist mobilizations in the last generation have been on the right, not the left, and Cohen's egalitarian sympathies do not help us understand Americans increasingly devoted to individual autonomy (in both the market and their personal lives...

...Are we to believe that the same voters who elected a solidly Republican Congress in 1946 would have endured an indefinite expansion of price controls...

...Viewed simply as craft, A Consumer's Republic demonstrates that Cohen hasn't lost her touch...

...Instead of decrying mass culture as a distraction from more important matters of class (a common lament among labor historians), Cohen argued that the Hollywood films, network radio programs, and chain stores of the 1920s created the shared references and tastes that allowed an ethnically diverse working class to create the great industrial trade unions of the 1930s...

...The whole of A Consumer's Republic is less than the parts...

...By war's end, the government had established price controls on 90 percent of goods sold...

...If s that Cohen has such a distaste for the market and capitalism that she is incapable of fairly assessing alternatives...

...Its limitation is to offer no convincing explanation of why such inequality has not (yet) become a compelling rallying cry...

...Neither does she highlight the fact that economic inequality decreased during the first decades after the war, before increasing dramatically over the past two decades...

...Cohen acknowledges that family income doubled between 1949 and 1973, but prefers not to dwell on this startling fact...

...Like many of the 1970s-era liberals she admires, Cohen's enthusiasm for democratic movements (the book ends with a call for consumers and citizens to hold "corporations and governments accountable to a higher standard") extends only so far...

...Only these blinders would allow Cohen, without comment, to list New York City rent control and its "advocacy infrastructure" as a positive reminder of the longtime influence of the 1940s consumer movement...

...In it Cohen married labor history and the history of consumer culture, two once-hostile subfields in the history guild...

...It then moves to the triumph of what Cohen calls the "citizen-consumer" ideal during World War II...

...Among the heroes of A Consumer's Republic are government regulators such as former Federal Trade Commission leader Michael Pertschuk, and activist New Jersey Supreme Court judges in the 1970s and 1980s willing to limit the authority of local school districts and zoning boards...

...political consultants mimic advertising gurus and order candidates to tailor their message to one of a hundred different voter market niches...

...For this reason alone Lizabeth Cohen's stimulating new study of consumers and consumption in the postwar era is welcome...

...Cohen's first book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, gen- erated much excitement among professional historians, making its successor something of an event...

...The same instinct allows Cohen to narrate the compelling saga of African Americans demanding access to theaters, stores, and restaurants in New Jersey during the 1940s and 1950s, and then regret that this focus on integration "only reinforced the legitimacy of the capitalist order as a way of organizing economic life...

...Or to chide Al Gore for attempting to improve the service orientation of the Post Office, one piece of a phenomenon that she dubs the "consumerization of the Republic...

...Cohen's ritual disclaimer-"I am a writer of history, not a contemporary critic"-is unconvincing, because an uneasy nostalgia suffuses the book...

...The achievement of A Consumer's Republic is to clarify how inequality could (and sometimes did) lurk behind a postwar language of consumption...

...Consumer organizations and the federal government could now make buying (and not buying) a patriotic duty...

...A similar ambivalence marks Cohen's treatment of democracy itself...

...By the 1980s, Cohen concludes, the idea that "the interests of individual citizens and of the nation were one and the same" had morphed into "an expectation that whaf s best for me is whaf s best for America...

...Ultimately, these homeowners defended a politics of zoning that made neighborhoods more homogenous in class (few doctors bought homes next to plumbers) and cemented racial inequality (schools in African-American areas were of lesser quality even as taxes in those same areas rose to pay for increased social services...

...The good citizen who had the public interest at heart," Cohen explains, knew that he or she must "restrain consumption...

...In an era of rising budget deficits and just after the conclusion of the war with Iraq, the president persuaded Congress to pass a tax cut whose benefits were sharply tilted toward the wealthiest Americans...

...And much of her argument, taken chapter by chapter, is compelling...

...Consumption so orients our politics that in moments of national crisis our president urges his country's citizens to go shopping...

...The book begins in the late 1930s with various consumer groups agitating for lower-priced and better-quality goods, and with African Americans taking the additional step of organizing boycotts against stores willing to sell to African Americans but not to hire them...

...The northern counties of New Jersey provide a superb case study, and Cohen is especially good at tracing how the consumer ideal of the suburban home had myriad deleterious effects...

...Cohen recognizes this, at least implicitly...

...and a wave of consumer legislation (such as the Consumer Product Safety Act) becomes law in the late 1960s and 1970s, but is defanged in the current government-bashing climate...

...This when the future of the U.S...

...Postal Service is uncertain in an age of e-mail and Federal Express...

...After a ritual jab at communitarians such as Michael Sandel and Christopher Lasch, and a dutiful cautioning against "broad characterizations" that elevate "white, middle-class, male, heterosexual, [and] thirtysomething [!]" as norms, Cohen does encourage twenty-first-century liberals to move beyond narrow interests and toward some notion of the general good...

...Instead she focuses, improbably, on the "real contests" of the immediate postwar era, when the battle to maintain price controls was not yet lost, along with a vision of consumption for public good not just private interest...

...The book's final photograph, of workers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds gathered in a union hall, testified to the possibility of workers themselves crafting a genuine new deal...

...Most economists, by contrast, would point to the nepotism surrounding rent control as Exhibit A when demanding an open market for scarce resources like Manhattan apartments...

...The percentage of New Jersey families that owned their own, single-family homes jumped from 7 percent in 1950 to 64 percent a decade later...

...Her virtuoso ability to blend photographs and prose remains, as does her nose for fresh archival sources...

...The rest is mostly a tale of woe: the consumer solidarity so evident during the war vanishes after VJ Day, with consumers, stymied by a lack of goods during the war (and money during the Depression that preceded it), embarking upon a massive spending spree...

...A Consumer's Republic is less cheerful...

...women take low-wage jobs in shopping malls built beyond the reach of wage earners trapped in cities...

...President Bush's conviction that Americans not serving in the armed forces need not make any sacrifice-during either the war on terrorism or following the war with Iraq-was equally striking...

...Is it relevant that neither New Jersey judges nor federal regulators are elected...