Long good buy.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: A Consumers' Republic The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America - Book Review

A CONSUMERS' REPUBLIC The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America by Lizabeth Cohen Alfred A. Knopf, $35.00

WHAT THE SECOND WORLD War is to the "greatest generation," the suburbs of the 1950s are to baby boomers--psychologically hallowed ground to be endlessly revisited. (Let's leave for another day the question of why one generation keeps going back to young adulthood and the other to childhood.) Lizabeth Cohen, a history professor at Harvard, proudly opens A Consumers, Republic with an adorable photograph of herself and her younger sister as little girls in the yard of a New Jersey ranch house in 1956, and follows that with a short autobiographical account of her greatest-generation parents' steady movement up the New York suburban ladder after the war. And the more conventionally historical bulk of her book touches many of the familiar postwar Cultural bases, from Levittowns, to David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man, to tailfinned automobiles designed for "planned obsolescence," to the psychologist Ernest Dichter figuring out how to make housewives buy appliances, to the rise of shopping centers and then shopping malls.

The conceptual rubric under which Cohen places all this comforting material is new, however: It's the idea that the mid-to-late-20th-century United States became the first country to organize itself politically around the idea of its people as individual consumers. Consumerism, as she presents it, has its roots in the New Deal, but it took off after the war, when the country became steadily more prosperous and mobile and the Democratic Party retreated from its prewar commitment to a political order based on an ever-growing welfare state and a heavily regulated economy. It turns out that all sorts of apparently disparate material fits into Cohen's category: consumer cooperatives and Keynesian economics, boycotts (especially Martin Luther King Jr.'s Montgomery bus boycott in 1955), the G.I. Bill, Ralph Nader during his consumer-crusader phase, the rise of segmented marketing, and suburban real-estate development patterns. Cohen often uses New Jersey as a specific example of whatever general trend she's discussing.

Journalists don't usually complain about academics being insufficiently theoretical, but in this case, Cohen's interesting basic idea provides so broad a license for going over a lot of fairly well-known history that the book's ratio of information to explanation is...