Cohen, Lizabeth (Ann) 1952-

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COHEN, Lizabeth (Ann) 1952-

PERSONAL:

Born February 4, 1952, in New York, NY; daughter of Paul Martin (an accountant and businessman) and Dorothy (an attorney; maiden name, Rodbell) Cohen; married Herrick Eaton Chapman, June 25, 1977. Education: Princeton University, A.B., 1973; University of California—Berkeley, M.A., 1981, Ph.D., 1986. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Jewish. Hobbies and other interests: Reading fiction, gardening, swimming, biking.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Harvard University, History Department, 201 Robinson Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, CA, assistant curator, 1975-77; Camron-Stanford House Museum, Oakland, CA, director, 1976-78; museum and history consultant; Carnegie-Mellon University, history department faculty, beginning 1986; New York University, New York, NY, member of faculty, 1992-97; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, currently Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Department of History.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, American Studies Association, Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Philip Taft Labor History award, Cornell University, 1990; Bancroft Prize in American History, Columbia University, 1991, finalist for Pulitzer Prize, for Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939; fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1993, American Council of Learned Societies, 1994, and Guggenheim Foundation, 1995.

WRITINGS:

Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

(With Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy) The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, 11th edition, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998, 12th edition, 2002.

A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to professional journals.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Book project on the culture and politics of the built environment.

SIDELIGHTS:

Harvard University history professor Lizabeth Cohen is the author of books that analyze how economic changes in the United States during the twentieth century have profoundly influenced society. Her award-winning Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 takes a new look at how the Great Depression affected ethnic and workingclass families and neighborhoods, which, in turn, helped create support for the New Deal, while A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America shows how the importance of mass consumption as an economic strategy and political ideology after World War II contributed to postwar prosperity, as well as to growing inequality and social segmentation in America.

Making a New Deal, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History, is the first book, according to Gilbert J. Gall in Labor Studies Journal, "to tell the story [of labor history in the 1920s and 1930s] as social history." Focusing much of her attention on what was going on in Chicago at the time, Cohen connects the two decades to show how circumstances conspired to turn the failed efforts of the labor movement in the 1920s into the successful economic force of the 1930s. Unlike some historians, who have felt that it was the rising mass culture of the 1920s that undermined ethnic and working-class culture, Cohen asserts that it was actually the Great Depression that caused the decline of ethnic institutions that had previously separated lower-class and minority groups. However, they subsequently became unified under one cause: economic justice through labor unions and New Deal government programs in what Cohen labels "moral capitalism." This idea was accelerated by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) with the help of radio and movies. Thus the old cultures that had previously isolated working-class groups were replaced by a new mass culture that united them into an influential political force. "Cohen's treatment of this concept is complex and brilliant," according to Nick Salvatore in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, "for she recognizes how it can legitimize rights and yet simultaneously affirm for these activists a rather traditional, even conservative, political understanding of themselves and their society."

While not all of these ideas are new to historians, "the analysis," according to Gall, "is unique in its single-minded focus on the agency of industrial workers creating changes." Critics were particularly impressed, as was Nation contributor David Nasaw, with Cohen's ability to utilize an eclectic range of "evidence, much of it from underutilized oral-history collections and first-person primary sources." Nasaw continued, "Though other labor and working-class historians have also emphasized the importance of culture, few have paid it the attention she has or integrated the material as securely into their arguments." Although some critics found flaws in the text—Salvatore, for example, said the author "pays too little attention to Chicago workers who remained outside the CIO; discusses black workers only sporadically; and is perhaps too quick to assert the 'wholeness' of ethnic culture even in the early days of mass culture"—Making a New Deal was praised by many reviewers as an important contribution to social history. Salvatore himself called it "a superb book," despite some drawbacks, and Gall felt the author presents her arguments with "skill and effectiveness." "This landmark study," concluded M. Cantor in Choice, "will elevate the perceptions of social historians who read it, as they must."

With A Consumer's Republic Cohen picks up the story of economics and social history where her first book left off. Here she sees the rise of the concept of American citizen as consumer to have initiated important and often detrimental effects on the country's social structure. Cohen describes two types of consumers in the book: the "citizen-consumer," who started to become a force at the beginning of the twentieth century when citizens began to be concerned for public safety and individual buyer's rights, and the "consumer-as-purchaser," who is convinced by political rhetoric that the way to improve the American economy and society is to buy more products. This second type of consumer flourished after World War II with the rise of what Cohen calls "the consumer' Republic," which featured a mass-consumption-oriented economy expected to deliver not just prosperity but greater democracy and equality as well. Mass suburbs were the cornerstone of the consumers' Republic, with their privately owned single-family homes and encouragement of purchasing more goods that were previously in less demand, ranging from cars for commuting to work in the city to lawnmowers for tending one's yard. "Business and government joined forces in an effort to convince Americans that the way to prosperity for all was perpetual material progress for the individual," as Ryan McKay explained in March online.

This progress did not benefit everyone—far from it. African Americans and other minorities who could not afford homes in the suburbs were left out of the picture. This encouraged segregation of residential communities—whites in the suburbs, minorities in the city—and the eventual rise of the gated community. Suburbs also brought about the creation of the shopping mall, which also "undermined equality, in Cohen's view," because as private property located in white suburbs they discouraged the coming together of many kinds of Americans as had assembled in the public space of the downtown street or city square. The consumers' Republic also segregated Americans by gender, as the all-important G.I. Bill benefited men almost exclusively, and credit cards and mortgages were issued mostly to men.

With the exception of the years during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, when consumer advocacy made a short-lived return, Cohen sees a decline in the citizen as consumer, perhaps irrevocably. The Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush administrations have worsened the problem, and "Cohen sees ever more depressing consequences of the historical events that she has recounted," related Alan Wolfe in the New Republic. "Catalogue buying and Web-based commerce threaten to undo the malls with even more privatized forms of shopping." The author also delves "into the dark realms of marketing and consumer research. One theme dominates her discussion of these subjects. In theory, consumption, whether we like it or not, ought to unify us, because we all become consumers of roughly similar goods. In reality, marketing specialists discovered in the postwar years that the best way to sell goods is to segment the audience that is buying them." With all of these factors combined, resulting in an ever-more fragmented rather than united society, "is it any wonder," asked Wolfe, "that our politics became so contentious and our unity around a common conception of the good so impossible?"

A Consumer's Republic was praised by many critics. "Cohen excels at showing how a society based on mass consumption is a double-edged sword," said McKay. "Through meticulous and thorough research she reinforces her arguments with hundreds of references, charts, photographs, and other interesting supplemental material." Wolfe also called the work a "refreshingly bold and ambitious book," adding that "Cohen's history is impeccable; her almost superhuman investigations into obscure sources and archives bring many rewards, and she writes well enough to sustain a reader's attention through a very long book." Wolfe, nevertheless, did punch some holes into her arguments. For example, he contended that continuing the rent and price controls initiated during the Depression, a policy Cohen supports, would have had a negative impact on the underclass. "The primary beneficiaries of rent control were not the poor who needed housing," stated Wolfe, "but the middle-class people who already had it," and "price controls in general would have frozen into place advantages that well-off people already had, harming the poor more than anyone else." Wolfe also felt that "Cohen underestimates the everyday longing for unrestrained spending unleashed by the war's necessary restraints." Washington Monthly contributor Nicholas Lemann further felt that the book contains more information than explanation and that Cohen does not sufficiently draw "the conceptual line between the citizen variety she likes and the purchaser variety she doesn't."

Yet reviewers still highly recommended A Consumer's Republic. For example, Brad Hooper, writing in Booklist, declared it "a copiously researched, brilliantly conceived, and ultimately quite instructive study of American economics since the Depression." And McKay concluded that "Cohen has done a commendable job of bringing together a great deal of information about a central truth of American culture, and she goes one step further to analyze its political economy—which in these times is invaluable."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, November 1, 2002, Brad Hooper, review of A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, p. 462.

Choice, February, 1991, M. Cantor, review of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, p. 990.

Industrial Labor Relations Review, January, 1992, Nick Salvatore, review of Making a New Deal, pp. 400-401.

Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2002, review of A Consumer's Republic, p. 1584.

Labor Studies Journal, fall, 1992, Gilbert J. Gall, review of Making a New Deal, p. 92.

Library Journal, March 1, 2003, Stephen L. Hupp, review of A Consumer's Republic, p. 102.

Nation, March 18, 1991, David Nasaw, review of Making a New Deal, p. 348.

New Republic, March 17, 2003, Alan Wolfe, "Buying Alone," p. 28.

New York Times Book Review, March 2, 2003, David M. Oshinsky, "Charge It! In the 1950s, Buying Everything in Sight Became the New Patriotism," p. 15.

Publishers Weekly, November 18, 2002, review of A Consumer's Republic, p. 51.

Washington Monthly, January-February, 2003, Nicholas Lemann, "Long Good Buy," p. 52.

Women's Review of Books, March, 2003, Nancy Tomes, "The Masses and the Market," p. 6.