------------ 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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