Luxurious Citizens

Graduate student Jo Cohen studies the relationship between consumption and citizenship in 19th-century America.

From “buy American” campaigns to appeals in Chevrolet ads to “refuel America,” messages that correlate consumption and patriotism are plentiful in this country. Jo Cohen, a doctoral student in the Department of History, wondered how this came to be in a “nation that forged its identity in the strength of the boycott.”

In the years that followed independence, Cohen explains, Americans were exhorted to divorce themselves from imperial goods in order to foster the creation of an American economy. One hundred years later, millions of Americans flocked to Philadelphia to commemorate their centennial and their success as “luxurious citizens” of an emerging industrial world power. Cohen’s dissertation explores the connections Americans made between their rights and obligations as citizens and their experiences and expectations as consumers in the rapidly changing commercial landscape of 19th-century New York and Philadelphia. She focuses on these two cities because they both had powerful economies and served as commercial and cultural centers.

With the support of several fellowships, including two from the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Cohen has been conducting broad-ranging archival research to explore the cultural and political history of consumer identity.

Her study of the War of 1812, for example, reveals tensions between the fledgling U.S. government’s need for citizens to stop consuming British goods and the prevailing political opinion that the government could not legislate effectively on consumption. The sovereignty of consumer decisions was further supported, Cohen says, in the public controversy about whether or not auctions could be taxed. Merchants, who wanted auctioneers to be taxed in order to diminish their competitive advantage, attacked the nature of the auction houses, claiming that auctioneers took advantage of consumers. Lawmakers legislated in favor of the auction houses, a decision that reinforced the idea that consumers had the right to take their own risks and make their own decisions when participating in the marketplace.

Cohen’s research also shows how changing ideas about consumption were reflected in fairs organized by the Franklin and American Institutes (educational establishments that promoted American manufacturing and provided education and information on technical subjects). While the institutes intended for the fairs to promote local heavy industry, they instead attracted artisans who specialized in finely crafted consumer goods. Cohen’s study of 19th-century advertisements reveals a similar rejection of practical utility in favor of consumer-centric domestic comforts. In the early 1800s, ads portrayed boxes of goods, ships and emblems of manufacturing. Later in the century ads featured comfortable shops populated with well-dressed shoppers. “Advertising,” Cohen says, “idealized the idea of the middle-class bourgeois consumer and created a more universal idea of what it meant to be a consumer.” She explains that by the 1860s, consumption had been configured as a mode of civic participation. During the Civil War, for example, consumers sought goods such as jewelry and stationery emblazoned with patriotic imagery.

Cohen feels that this relatively unexplored period in the history of American consumerism raises interesting issues about who molds the idea of the consumer and about the “hidden pledges of allegiance citizens make in a capitalist democracy.” On one hand, she says, consumers seemed to jump at the opportunity to express their patriotism through the decision to buy certain types of goods. This shift seemingly widened the parameters of civic participation, perhaps especially for women who could not fight on the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam. But Cohen also speculates that these same ideas may have narrowed the meaning of citizenship. “In a consumer economy, there seems to be an internal psychological link between what we can get and what it makes us,” Cohen says. “When consumer choices become a way of expressing political conviction or civic allegiance, they begin to crowd out the other ways we have of making citizenship meaningful on a daily basis. In the end, this forces us to confront what ‘buying American’ really does for American civic life.”