ED GLAESER: You have memorably
referred to postwar America as a consumers' republic. And in fact, written a wonderful
and erudite book on the topic. Tell us what you mean
by consumers' republic, and how it relates to the
massive urbanization that came through America after World War II. LIZABETH COHEN: My concept of consumers'
republic is of my own invention, and it's a shorthand that I use
to talk about a reorientation in the American economy and in American
political culture towards an America that is built around mass consumption
and that involves material consumption, but also a new channel for delivering
long-sought American goals of freedom and equality. So what I see happening
is after a long period of a Great Depression during
the 1930s and World War II, which finally brought the United
States out of that depression, actually quite a crisis at the
end of World War II about what would sustain
that American recovery. Here we were building-- GLAESER: And my fellow economists
were terrified during this time period. We couldn't possibly imagine how
we were going to get through this. LIZABETH COHEN: Exactly. And what are we going to do? We're not building planes. We're not going to be
building tanks and armaments. Though it should be said that the
Cold War provided some of that answer. But basically, there was this embrace of
the production of mass consumer goods. So we'll change factories that make
planes into factories that make cars. We will make appliances where
we were making armaments. And so the American society,
the American economy gets restructured around mass
consumption in the postwar period. And that really defines a lot of what
it means to succeed for Americans. Now part of that was to also make
the largest consumer item a home. A private home. GLAESER: And perhaps the
second largest is the car. LIZABETH COHEN: Yes. Exactly.
GLAESER: Hence the two going together. LIZABETH COHEN: And you needed
a car to get to that home if the home was in the suburbs. And there were options that housing
planners and developers had. We could have expanded our cities. We could have built more
multi-family housing. That might actually have been a more
strategic approach in that we would have been able to house more people. But instead, we went a different way. We developed large areas
of single-family homes. What I think was really crucial
about the way in which suburbia took shape was that this is a postwar
suburbia, because we should just say that suburbanization
is a longstanding process. There were suburbs in the 18th century. Boston had Brookline and Milton, which
were flourishing in the 19th century, and they were elite suburbs. By the late 19th century, we had
upper middle class suburbs often built around trains. In the 20th century, there
were probably two key moments when suburbia really took off. One the 1920s, which was more of a
middle class suburbanization process, and then in this postwar period
that I'm talking to you about now, we had what I call mass
suburbanization, and that's where you were getting lots
of homes built on small plots. But the key is that they
were separate municipalities, and so people were no longer
within that urban political unit. They were really owning a
home within a separate entity. When you start segmenting and making
these communities very distinctive with their own tax bases that are
going to pay for services like schools, and a wealthy suburb is going to be
able to afford to spend more per pupil than a working class suburb where people
are not in a position to pay as much, their homes aren't valued at
the same level, you end up, despite the promise of the
consumers' republic, which is that we are going to
deliver a new kind of equality, you end up with new kinds of inequality
in the metropolitan area that starts to surround a city. And so in some very disturbing ways,
as the consumers' republic played out, it really fed these new
kinds of inequality. GLAESER: It's probably worth
emphasizing that during this period, America switches from being a nation
predominately of renters on the eve of World War II to being a
nation predominantly of owners, almost at modern levels by 1960-- LIZABETH COHEN: And then we
should say how it is possible that so many people became homeowners. You know, that wouldn't have
happened before the war, and a major reason for that
was the passage of the GI bill during the war, which allowed
veterans to get benefits to help pay for their schooling. But most importantly for
this conversation, that they were able to get subsidies
to buy homes for down payments as well as for mortgages. And so an average working person
or a lower middle class person was now able to buy a home. The other thing that-- and that all
came from the federal government. GLAESER: And it's worth emphasizing
that in the '20s, we had mortgages, but they were five years. They were typically small. Now we're talking 15 or 30-year
mortgages became the norm, and you just required a lot
less money down on your house. LIZABETH COHEN: And what
made this so possible was the passing of the
National Highway Act of 1956. All that clearing of
farmland and forest to make space and possible those roadways was
supported by the federal government. And so you could live at
some distance from a city. You could still go to
a factory downtown. You could still go to
an office downtown, but live in this metropolitan area. So we created a metropolitan area that
was very segmented socioeconomically, with downtown becoming in many
cases-- and the urban core by the 1960s, some cases
being very upper class still, but then very much poorer people. And the vast middle class moving
out into these separate metropolitan suburban communities.
