John G. Schwegmann, real estate investor, retail pioneer, legal activist, idiosyncratic politician, and New Orleans–area playboy, should make for an instructive and fascinating case study of twentieth-century business practice as well as New Orleans and Louisiana political culture. Most famous for his New Orleans regional conglomerate of supermarkets and discount superstores—stores that in model and practice often predated more famous innovators like Walmart—Schwegmann was also a key figure in national legal battles around retail price regulation. Locally in the New Orleans area, Schwegmann played instructive parts in key developments including the residential expansion of the city following swamp drainage after World War I, the destruction of the city's surprisingly robust regulatory apparatus, its later metropolitanization after World War II, and one of the country's first fights against public financing of sports stadiums.

Insofar as David Cappello's The Peoples Grocer: John G. Schwegmann, New Orleans, and the Making of the Modern Retail World demonstrates that Schwegmann was a key and largely forgotten figure in national business history and local political and urban history, the book is a resounding success. Unfortunately for scholars as well as general readers, beyond clearly establishing Schwegmann's importance and the occasional peculiar and eccentric story that is de rigueur for almost everyone who writes about twentieth-century Louisiana politics and culture, that is the extent of the book's success. Often reading more like hagiography than history, biography, or case study, The People's Grocer is so full of platitudes (without Schwegmann's lawsuits against fair trade laws the “United States . . . might not have won the Cold War”), so inaccurate, and at times such stereotypical and essentialist-based history—as well as lacking attention to virtually any historiography—as to render it often unreadable (pp. 184–85).

The book begins with a brief and overly generalized history of the corner store, the area of New Orleans now known as the Bywater where Schwegmann grew up and came of age, and his male forebears on his father's side. Early on, the unnerving stereotypes utilized by Cappello begin to distract the reader from what substance in the narrative is of use. We are told that the Bywater moniker only came into existence after the area's heyday, “as befits the speed with which business is typically conducted in the tropics” (p. 15). Vice, apparently an objective and transhistorical category, is “rooted . . . in a devil-may-care sense of fatalism” (p. 73). Odd and normative platitudes such as these abound in the book and its analysis. Detailed historical literature on such topics as working-class consumption patterns, immigration and ethnicity, the history of retailing, and twentieth-century Louisiana politics are completely absent from the narrative and the citations, and the result is a rash of generalizations that anyone with knowledge of twentieth-century scholarship will immediately question. This is especially unfortunate as Schwegmann's personal and business history itself, of which Cappello does a solid job of chronicling, if not analyzing, is particularly instructive in a variety of regards.

Schwegmann's career began to take off at the height of the Depression, when he worked for a locally based real estate brokerage firm. During these years, Schwegmann began to buy up properties from poor and unemployed New Orleanians for pennies on the dollar, flipping them to pools of wealthy investors or, upon seeing a particularly good deal, keeping them for himself and renting them out. For Cappello, these episodes are instructive insofar as they introduced Schwegmann to the city's ruling elite and made him a small fortune that would later allow him to enter into the discounting industry. Much more interesting and uncommented upon, though, is the extent to which Schwegmann's story is part of a broader quotidian history of real estate speculation and rent intensification that occurred in countless locales and that during years of mass financial crisis have been a key and largely unstudied mechanism by which wealth has been upwardly redistributed.

Schwegmann's seemingly single-handed destruction of New Orleans’ widespread and fascinating public market system similarly is left largely untouched in this narrative. Since 1779 the city of New Orleans had regulated the selling of meat, seafood, and produce through a series of expanding publicly run markets with the dual purpose of guaranteeing sanitation and preventing monopolization of essential goods. This history testifies to the fact that New Orleans had one of the most sophisticated urban regulatory systems in municipal politics well through the middle of the twentieth century. Schwegmann's role in ending what Cappello can see only as some archaic antimodern bastion of illiberalism is reduced to his simply telling the reader that New Orleans mayor Robert Maestri thought public markets were a farce.

The book reaches better footing when it chronicles Schwegmann's forays into the discount retail industry and his legal and legislative assaults on fair trade laws. In both respects, Schwegmann was clearly at the national forefront, as his three-hundred-thousand-foot store in the New Orleans area of Gentilly was opened in 1957 and was at the time the largest in the world. The funding mechanism for the store merits comment as well, with Schwegmann issuing private ten-year bonds, the vast majority of which were bought by small-scale investors at the hundred-dollar level. Cappello is also correct to point to Schwegmann's crusade against fair trade laws as perhaps his most important historical legacy. Indeed, he is compelling here in suggesting that no individual did more to end such laws. Unfortunately, there is little nuance in his analysis, as Schwegmann is portrayed, sometimes to an almost comic degree, as a sole crusader against a bastion of laws that are so inconceivable as to be removed from their historical context. The reasons such laws were initially passed, as well as their final defeat, are not the product of political relationships and the power of various competing industrial sectors in any given moment, but a simple story of evil price setters being finally beaten back by the free market's avenger in the form of John Schwegmann.

The final chapters of the book follow Schwegmann as he enters into a fairly unsuccessful political career, losing a series of parish (county), district, and state races before finally joining the state legislature for a brief moment. Much more instructive, and largely unanalyzed in its attraction or lack thereof, was Schwegmann's campaign against state funding of the Louisiana Superdome. Here as well, though, the lack of historiographical context becomes problematic. This could very well have been an opening and predictive salvo in the politics of public funding for sports franchises that continues to be a key political issue in various times and places across the country. Instead, the book largely glosses over the social and political implications of this campaign in favor of some inside-baseball history of how Schwegmann's campaign was defeated. Thus, like much of the book, these chapters make clear that Schwegmann deserves a greater place in the business, social, and political history of the twentieth century as well as the metropolitan history of New Orleans. Hopefully, The People's Grocer will help give birth to the kinds of work that can truly contextualize Schwegmann and his regional retail empire in many of the key processes and events that continue to shape New Orleans and the nation today.