Just for the hell of it, an old school paper...

In his book An All-Consuming Century, Gary Cross tells us that “visions of a political community of stable, shared values and active citizenship have given way to a dynamic but seemingly passive society of consumption in America, and increasingly across the globe”(1). It seems, though, today we live in a society where consumerism has not only replaced the idea of the ‘active citizen,’ but also has come to be equated with it. This can be seen in the growing importance of the consumer in the political world, as well as the way the consumer approach to life has come to dominate other aspects of life as well.

The beginnings of our movement towards citizen as consumer can be seen in the 1930s with the realization of the importance of the consumer. Maintaining the ability of people to consume was seen as the way to a healthy economy. This meant keeping the consumers happy, giving them some voice in how things were run.

Consumers, Lizabeth Cohen explains in A Consumers’ Republic, were a recognized category of American citizen’s before this time. The Progressives of the late 1800s and the early 1900s had as a part of their campaign what could be considered the beginnings of a consumer protection movement. But, as Cohen says, “few Americans during these years considered consumers a self-conscious, identifiable interest group on a par with labor and business whose well-being required attention for American capitalism and democracy to prosper”(23). The recognition that consumers did need attention came during the Great Depression of the 1930s and grew steadily more important as time went on.

The 1930s saw the birth of several government agencies set up, as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal plan to deliver the country from depression, to deal with the issue of consumer protection. Among these agencies were the National Recovery Administration and the Consumer Advisory Board, both of which were created to “include representatives of the ‘consuming public’ along side business and labor”(Cohen 19), and give these consumers a voice in the government. Cohen places these organizations in a category she calls the ‘citizen consumers.’ She says that they “were regarded as responsible for safeguarding the general good of the nation, in particular for prodding government to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers in the private market place”(18).

This category also included non-government groups of citizens, such as the National Consumers’ League. They used their power as consumers to make sure manufacturers were not abusing their employees. They advocated buying only products that assured they were manufactured “under morally acceptable and sanitary conditions”(Cohen 22). Other groups organized boycotts and helped strikers against corporations they felt to be in violation of these standards.

At the same time as the notion of ‘citizen consumer’ sprang up, so did the notion of ‘purchaser consumer,’ people who contributed to the welfare of the nation and economy simply through consuming. This was a role that corporations promoted, because it was not critical of their role in production and it was easily made attractive with the promise of higher standards of living through consumer goods. Mass consumption was also seen as the real way to revive the economy. “It was the buying power of consumers in the aggregate, not the protection of the individual consumers in the marketplace, that manufacturers like General Motors, along with a growing number of economists and government officials by the late 1930s, thought would bring the United States out of depression and ensure its survival as a democratic nation”(Cohen 20).

Through the development in American ideology of the consumer as the savior of the economy, we can begin to see the primacy it takes in the list of responsibilities of the citizen. Cohen explains that, “by the end of the depression decade, invoking ‘the consumer’ would become an acceptable way of promoting the public good, of defending the economic rights and the needs of the ordinary citizens”(Cohen 23). Consumerism is both the way for citizens to assert themselves politically, like through boycotts, and to improve the economy and raise the standard of living for everyone. The main goal of the New Deal was to bring our country of depression by making sure that more people had this ability to consume, saving democracy and making sure everyone had better things. Robert S. Lynd, a member of the Consumer Advisory Board established in 1933, reflected this view. Cohen quotes him saying, “Nothing less than the viability of American democracy was at stake, Lynd insisted. ‘The only way that democracy can survive… is through the quality of living it can help the rank-and-file of its citizens to achieve,’ not simply an adequate standard of living”(19).

Consumption was not what everyone was thinking about during the 1930s. Gary Cross says that the depression put in many people’s minds the value of frugality. He says, however, that, “many Depression-era Americans were unwilling to abandon the ‘luxuries’ of the 1920s”(69). He cites the fact that many Americans continued to take vacations in their cars, even though money was tight and gasoline prices were rising. For Cross the fact that consumerism was able to develop in such a significant way during economic depression was a sign of the power it has over Americans. He says that “the Depression led to a frustrated consumerism more than a rejection of the capitalist system”(71), which had allowed the economic collapse to occur in the first place. It was also this power of consumerism that, perhaps, allowed the government to be so successful in promoting programs to increase the ability to consume and promote the purchaser consumer.

Cohen writes that “the new expectations that Americans developed during the Great Depression for how consumers should contribute to a healthy economy and polity would leave a legacy for World War II and the postwar era”(20). During the postwar era mass consumption reached a new level of expansion. In order to transfer from a war economy, where the demand for military supplies fueled production, to a peace economy, where there was no longer that demand, the government once again began to promote the idea of the purchaser consumer. Mass consumption was once again seen as the savior of the economy and the duty of American citizens.

At the same time, with the dawn of the Cold War and the rise of anti-communist sentiment, consumerism was used as a way to show America’s superiority to Communist nations. The consumers’ freedom of choice was equated with the democratic principles of political freedom. In 1959, Richard Nixon, then vice-president, proclaimed that “the variety of goods available to American consumers” was “symbolic of ‘our right to choose’”(Cohen 126). This equation of consumer freedom with the rights of citizens and the push for people to consume as part of their American duty led to a consumer fervor that Cohen says resembled a sort of religion. Cohen claims that, “faith in a mass consumption postwar economy hence came to mean much more than the ready availability of goods to buy. Rather, it stood for and elaborate, integrated ideal of economic abundance and democratic political freedom, both equitably distributed, that became almost a national civil religion from the late 1940s into the 1970s”(127). Indeed, at this point we can see how, as Cross says, “consumer sovereignty in the market place had replaced consumer rights in political life”(139).

As people began to embrace their roles as consumers, they also began interacting with other areas of civic life in the same manner as they did when consuming. Politics itself began to look like a function of the market. People began to vote for candidates as if they were deciding between consumer goods. And politicians, in response, began campaigning using the techniques that advertising used to promote consumer goods and consumption. A telling sign of this development is the statement that, as Cohen quotes Rosser Reves as saying,“ ‘a man in a voting booth hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of toothpaste in a drug store. The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice’”(332). I believe this shows literally the equation of consumer with citizen. Politicians looked to the markets to tell them what people wanted and how to approach and sell themselves to these consumers.

In the 1980s, the voice of the consumer became the preferred method of interacting within the political and civic arena. Thanks to the deregulation efforts of President Reagan there was hardly any alternative. He dismantled many of the government agencies set up to regulate the industry in order to protect consumers. Instead, the market was supposed to be the regulator. The way for Americans to voice discontent with the corporate world was through the market, through how they chose to consume. Cohen says that through this process citizen/consumers “increasingly related to government itself as shoppers in a market place”(396).

Today we have the citizen consumer, not the one described by Cohen as striving for the protection of the people from the corporations, but as described by Toby Miller, in The Well Tempered Citizen, as “loyal citizens who learn[ed] to govern themselves in the interests of the cultural-capitalist polity”(ix). These are citizens that don’t question their roles as consumers or the ideologies behind consumerism, and faithfully accept the freedoms of consumerism, to choose between products, as the replacement for the freedoms of a citizen. This is what it means to be a citizen in the United States. Miller says that for a capitalist democracy, with a need to generate industry and a preference for the private sector and management, to continue it must produce two kinds of citizens, “the selfless, active citizen who cares for others and favors a political regime that compensates for losses in the financial domain; and the selfish, active consumer who favors a financial regime that compensates for losses in the political domain”(130). Our society has certainly succeeded in producing the latter kind of citizen.

Cross is right when he says “consumerism redefined democracy, creating social solidarities and opportunities for participation that transcended suffrage rights or political ideologies”(2). What the government, and the industries it supports, want us to believe is that consumerism is the best way for us to be citizens. “In the context of consumerism, liberty is not an abstract right to participate in public discourse or free speech. It means expressing oneself and realizing personal pleasure through goods”(Cross 3). It will keep our economy strong.

Works Cited
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic. Vintage, 2003.
Cross, Gary. All Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. NY: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citzenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993.