------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (July 2005)
Meg Jacobs, _Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in
Twentieth-Century America_. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2005. xii + 349 pp. $35 (cloth), ISBN: 0-691-08664-8.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Robert Collins, Department of History,
University of Missouri - Columbia.
Over the past several decades historians have explored the idea of
the United States as a mass consumption society to good advantage.
Indeed, they have come to regard mass consumption as one of the
defining elements of cultural modernity (hence, the tendency to view
the 1920s as the "first modern decade"). But the political impact of
mass consumption has been rather more elusive. Following the lead of
those intellectuals who applied the mass culture critique to the
United States at mid-century, the conventional wisdom has tended to
consider mass consumption primarily as an escape _from_ politics
rather than a vehicle _for_ politics. In this superb book, Meg Jacobs
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rebuts that overly
simple interpretation by arguing persuasively that the pocketbook
issues of how much things cost and the ability of the mass of
American consumers to afford them lay at the heart of left-wing
politics over the first half of the twentieth century.
The pocketbook politics Jacobs describes unfolded over the first six
decades of the twentieth century on both the local and national
levels, encompassing activities that ranged from grass-roots protests
such as rent strikes and consumer boycotts to congressional
law-making and the bureaucratic administration of national wage and
price controls. Consumerist forces, which included at various times
and in differing combinations ordinary bargain hunters, social
reformers, intellectuals, labor unionists, and liberal government
officials, pursued a number of interconnected goals. First, they
attempted to exert downward pressure on prices, demanded better
information about products, and called for minimum standards of
product safety and purity. Second, they supported the drive for
industrial unionism and higher wages as a way to bring the mass of
people up to a morally acceptable "American standard of living."
Third, they developed an influential view of the U.S. economy that
held that overall economic prosperity, the welfare of all, depended
on the maintenance of mass purchasing power. As Edward Filene, the
Boston merchandiser and archetypal "purchasing-power progressive,"
put it in the 1920s, "Production cannot be profitable unless it
produces, first of all, consumers" (p. 80).
The economic collapse of the 1930s appeared to liberals to validate
the earlier concerns about underconsumption, while business saw
overproduction as the more serious problem. Consequently, Jacobs
argues, policymakers in the early years of the New Deal alternated
between trying to boost consumers' buying power and trying to raise
prices; sometimes, as in the National Recovery Administration (NRA),
they tried to achieve both ends at the same time. Gradually, however,
left-leaning New Dealers created a formidable political movement by
joining together consumer interests pursuing lower prices and higher
product standards and labor interests fighting for higher wages and
stronger unions. The result was a genuinely radical New Deal, one
that tried to redistribute both wealth and power while challenging
business prerogatives and attacking monopolies.
The culmination of leftist purchasing-power politics came in World
War II with the creation of a command economy in which the state took
control of wages and prices, most notably through the operations of
the Office of Price Administration. The OPA, in Jacobs's words,
"served as a radical model of state management: a popular government
agency working in alliance with a coalition of labor, consumers, and
social liberals that challenged the right of private industries to
set their own prices and sell their items freely" (p. 180). The end
of World War II witnessed a bitter and protracted struggle between
liberals who sought to extend the OPA and its far-reaching apparatus
of controls and conservatives who sought to abolish it. The
conservatives won, and the return to a market economy constituted a
critical turning point in the history of the modern American
political economy. Thereafter, despite a brief experience with wage
and price controls during the Korean War and continued anxiety over
inflation in the 1950s, liberalism gradually moved away from its
quantitative, purchasing- power orientation toward a more qualitative
and rights-centered brand of politics that flourished in the 1960s
and beyond.
No short summary can do justice to Jacobs's achievement in this
volume. In arguing that "twentieth-century consumerism was not merely
a distraction for the working class nor simply a by-product of
national prosperity" but rather "the linchpin in an ongoing political
debate about how to organize, reform, and regulate American
capitalism," she provides an important reinterpretation of the
contours of liberal politics in the first half of the twentieth
century (p. 265). Moreover, she makes this large argument compelling
by grounding it in impressive archival and secondary research and a
truly striking command of the politics and policies of the broad
time-span under discussion.
On the whole, Jacobs is approving of the consumer liberalism she
describes so well, which she views as exemplifying "the democratic
potential of an engaged citizenry pursuing the promise of a better,
richer life" (p. 265). But she is never uncritical or tendentious,
and remains alert throughout to the subtleties, contradictions, and
ironies embedded in her topic.
In the end, one's assessment of purchasing-power liberalism is likely
to be strongly influenced by how one views the role of prices and
markets in a capitalist system. Jacobs's protagonists tended to view
the pricing mechanism more in terms of power and fairness than in
terms of efficiency. They did not dwell on the crucial role prices
play in the allocation of resources in a market economy. Nor, for
that matter, does Jacobs, and that fact colors her analysis in subtle
ways. For example, she explains the failure to extend OPA-like
controls into the postwar world chiefly in _political_ terms,
emphasizing the internal stresses within the liberal coalition
between labor fighting for higher wages and an expanding middle-class
fearful of inflation. Readers who particularly value the price system
for its contribution to efficient resource allocation will likely
attribute the collapse of the OPA controls regime to its own
inevitably stultifying, long-run _economic_ inefficiency. Regarding
the extension of the OPA, what liberals interpret as an historic
missed opportunity, conservatives will view as a narrow escape.
It is a tribute to this first-rate study that it opens up such
fundamental issues in exciting new ways. Every serious student of
modern U.S. political history and political economy will profit from
reading Jacobs's path-breaking scholarship.
Robert Collins is Middlebush Professor of History at the University
of Missouri-Columbia, where he teaches modern U.S. history. In spring
2006 Columbia University Press will publish his book _Eighties
America: The Recentering of Politics and Culture in the Age of
Reagan_.
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Published by EH.Net (July 2005). All EH.Net reviews are archived at
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