LISA JACOBSON. Raising Consumers: Children and the Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. (Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 299. $24.00

Abstract

Who could forget the moment of discovering that money can buy happiness? The crisp bills inside a birthday card exchanged for a coveted toy, or a week's allowance blown all at once in an orgy of candy bars and soda pop? For some, the painful lessons of consumer disappointment also lingered: the carefully hoarded box-tops finally redeemed for a cheap plastic toy or the “sea monkeys” charmingly described on a bubblegum wrapper that turned out to be nothing more than brine shrimp. Lisa Jacobson describes allowances and box-top premiums as part of a larger children's consumer culture. This culture, she argues, stretches back to the early twentieth century and was well established by the 1920s and 1930s. Through a series of case studies, she examines children's socialization as consumers and future citizens of what Lizabeth Cohen has influentially described as a “consumer's republic.” Mass marketers were among the first to recognize the economic potential of child consumers. They reached out through the pages of magazines such as St. Nicholas and American Boy and later, through radio programs that included elaborate contests and promotions. Jacobson carefully details the ways these campaigns were gendered and also gives some attention to the role of ethnicity in shaping consumption—most vividly in novelist Joseph Heller's account of his unsuccessful childhood efforts to convince his Jewish mother to buy Wheaties. His yearning was denied because that bright orange box lacked the mark of rabbinical approval. Jacobson nicely analyzes cultural ambivalence about childhood consumption that threatened to turn the Victorian innocent into a “mercenary little wretch” (p. 3). She dedicates one of the book's most original chapters to the history of children's savings banks, showing how this movement was designed to teach children to channel and discipline their spending. Another chapter considers the role of consumption in experts' promotion of play as a way to strengthen the companionate family.