Buying Power

A History of Consumer Activism in America

Lawrence B. Glickman

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226298665
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

A definitive history of consumer activism, Buying Power traces the lineage of this political tradition back to our nation's founding, revealing that Americans used purchasing power to support causes and punish enemies long before the word boycott even entered our lexicon. Taking the Boston Tea Party as his starting point, Lawrence Glickman argues that the rejection of British imports by revolutionary patriots inaugurated a continuous series of consumer boycotts, campaigns for safe and ethical consumption, and efforts to make goods more broadly accessible. He explores abolitionist-led efforts to eschew slave-made goods, African American consumer campaigns against Jim Crow, a 1930s refusal of silk from fascist Japan, and emerging contemporary movements like slow food. Uncovering previously unknown episodes and analyzing famous events from a fresh perspective, Glickman illuminates moments when consumer activism intersected with political and civil rights movements. He also sheds new light on activists' relationship with the consumer movement, which gave rise to lobbies like the National Consumers League and Consumers Union as well as ill-fated legislation to create a federal Consumer Protection Agency.

PART I

THE BIRTH OF CONSUMER ACTIVISM

1

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION CONSIDERED AS A CONSUMER MOVEMENT

A puzzle of American consumer activism that this book seeks to explore is the absence of historical memory that uniquely characterizes this political tradition. Whereas other social movements routinely mythologize, aggrandize, and often fictionalize the achievements of their predecessors, most consumer activists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made no attempt to do so, and by this omission failed to recognize the degree to which they were part of a continuing tradition.

In the long span of this history of omission and forgetting there is one significant exception: consumer activists, whatever their cause, have memorialized the American Founders, who, from the mid-1760s through independence, made consumer tactics central to their patriotic cause. Beginning in the 1820s, Southern nationalists embarking on a path of “non-intercourse” with the North wore homespun clothing and drank toasts to the surviving members of the founding generation, whom they saw as the pioneering consumerist patriots, and who blazed the path that they claimed to be following. Abolitionist boycotters of slave-made goods of the same period saw themselves as engaged in a mission of sanctifying the nation that also included tributes to the Founders; they proudly linked “antislavery to a beloved history of Revolutionary action.” Later generations, no longer surrounded by living veterans of the Revolutionary era, continued to pay obeisance to them, finding in their actions sanction for their own consumerist efforts. Even the generation that first used the word “boycott,” which was coined in 1880, was quick to deflect credit for the popularization of the idea to the Founders. Rare was the boycotter of the nineteenth or twentieth century, no matter the cause, who did not compare herself to the generation that defiantly wore homespun, tarred and feathered recalcitrant merchants, and dumped the king’s immoral tea into Boston Harbor rather than purchase or drink it. Indeed, consumer activists ever since have restaged the Tea Party to highlight the justice of their cause. In response to the postwar inflation of 1946, the American Veterans Committee staged a mock Boston Tea Party, dumping bales representing overpriced goods into the water. In 1969, supporters of the United Farm Workers–led boycott of grapes enacted what they called a “modern version” of the Tea Party in Boston, dropping grapes into the famous harbor.¹

Although other more direct and immediate precursors abounded, consumer activists generally hearkened back only to one era, the period between the Stamp Act and the Declaration of Independence. Whenever consumer activists shifted their gaze backward, they generally saw only the caboose and not the many trains between them and their Revolutionary forebears. If they saw themselves as part of a tradition at all, it was as part of a strangely discontinuous one; it was the story of the revival of a dormant form of political engagement. And so consumer activists of the late nineteenth century largely skipped over their antebellum predecessors and instead drew links to the Founders, only, in turn, to be themselves ignored or forgotten by future generations. The consumer movement of the 1930s ignored the nineteenth century entirely and found its roots in the 1770s. The movement of the 1960s, despite the strong continuities and obvious debt to the Depression generation, sought above all to claim the mantle of the men and women who made the nation through their consumer politics. Into the twenty-first century, the nonimporters of colonial America remain the lodestar for contemporary consumer activists.²

This selective memory is perhaps not so puzzling. It makes sense to link one’s strategies to the movement that within a generation was valorized and whose flaws and divisions had been long forgotten. Drawing a connection to the patriots has long been a way for Americans of different eras to emphasize their virtue. It is also politically expedient, inoculating a movement against charges, frequently directed against consumer activists throughout American history, of irresponsibility or unpatriotic activity.

Embedded in these rememberings and misrememberings is also a claim about the roots of the philosophy and tactics of consumer activism. Consumer activists, in this view, pay tribute to the Founders, and not to other predecessors, because they were not only the developers of democratic politics in the United States but also the originators of American consumer politics. In this view—one which has been shared by both consumer activists and historians—the Founders invented the practice, if not the word, of the boycott as well as the sense of consumer responsibility that assigned consumers important duties as citizens, and the extended solidarity through the cash and print nexus. Just as the Founders’ Constitution has been elaborated with amendments, without being fundamentally transformed, so too has their conception of consumer politics been adapted but not altered. The rest of the history of consumer activism is a footnote, a series of adaptations to what the historian T. H. Breen has called the “strikingly original” form of politics invented by the Revolutionaries.³ Modern consumer activism, in this view, can be understood as the unfolding of a script set in the 1760s and 1770s.

This view of the Revolutionary origins of American consumer activism is incomplete. Through an examination of the forms of consumer activism developed by Americans in the 1760s and 1770s, this chapter argues that the originality of the Revolutionary generation’s consumer tactics has been exaggerated and that historians have underestimated the degree to which the Founders drew on earlier traditions of popular protest. The similarities between the practices of modern consumer activists and those of the late eighteenth-century proponents of nonimportation have been overstated. A key to the differences between early modern consumer practices and later generations of consumer activists was that late colonial Americans held different understandings of the meaning of consumption. They lived in a world in which “consumer society” was newly emerging, in which to consume meant “to use” rather than “to purchase,” and one which was deeply suspicious of the nascent practices and techniques that became central not only to promoters of modern commercial society but also to proponents of modern consumer activism.

Calling attention to the continuities between Revolutionary consumer activists and their early modern predecessors and noting that many hallmarks of consumer activism emerged only in the nineteenth century, however, should not lead us to underestimate the novelty of the actions and ideas of the 1760s and 1770s. Consumer activism was born in the Revolutionary era, but it had important precursors; and, although born in this era, it did not develop all of its modern characteristics until the nineteenth century. Consumer activism in the Revolutionary era was, in other words, transitional. The characteristics of late eighteenth-century consumer activism reflected a mixture of continuity and change. Revolutionary consumer activism represented both the last act of the early modern tradition of consumer protest and the first stage of modern consumer activism. And this is precisely how many nineteenth-century consumer activists understood the actions of the Revolutionary generation. Those who in 1880 coined the word “boycott,” the signature tactic of consumer activism in the United States, maintained that it had a history as old as history itself, but one with special origins in the 1770s. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, consumer activists and commentators promoted the seemingly incoherent view that boycotts were a venerable, even ancient form of popular mobilization, and that the American Revolutionaries invented this mode of political protest. “The boycott has been employed against obnoxious individuals from time immemorial,” noted the political economist and Christian socialist Richard Ely in 1886, shortly after the controversial term was coined. This was a commonplace observation of the period. As evidence, Ely pointed to a boycott of “the monks of Christ’s Church” in 1327 in Canterbury, England. A few sentences later, however, the political economist made a seemingly abrupt and unexplained about-face when he claimed that “the boycott was born in the cradle of American liberty.” Several decades later, Samuel Gompers, the leader of the American Federation of Labor, noted in an interview that the “boycott itself—social, political, moral, and economic—is as old as human history.” Yet, despite noting that “the name is only a quarter of a century old,” he too simultaneously found its American origins in the Boston Tea Party. Ely, Gompers, and the many others who held these opposing views were correct. Consumer activism existed long before the 1760s, but the Revolutionaries remade it, in many cases by elaborating and extending techniques from earlier generations. Many of their techniques, in turn, were further refined by later generations. The decades of the 1760s and 1770s, then, can rightly be called the era in which modern consumer activism was born. I mean this in a sense similar to Neil McKendrick’s view that this period marked the birth of consumer society: “To speak of a birth indicates . . . the need for a long preceding period of growth, and the necessity for many further stages before the maturity of ‘a society of high mass consumption’ would be reached; and yet also indicates the importance, the excitement, the novel sense of a dramatic event.” Although consumer activism was conceived earlier and matured later, its nascent modern form emerged in the crucial moment of colonial and Revolutionary America. If it is misleading to say that this group invented consumer activism, the generation of the 1760s did shape it in significant ways, not least because every species of consumer activist that followed employed a similar mix of borrowing and reshaping to create a form of boycotting relevant to its time.⁴

Consumer activism of the Revolutionary period was a mixture of old and new, and it is the job of this chapter to tease out these differences. The new aspects of the Revolutionaries’ consumer activism were not all that endured. Just as important were the inheritances which they modified and, in turn, passed on. Many of the beliefs and techniques that they borrowed and adapted, rather than invented, became part and parcel of the consumer activists’ toolkit in the nineteenth century, and in many cases remain there to this day. These included many of the signature characteristics of consumer activism, the basic edifice upon which the architecture of consumer activism continues to rest. In their ambivalence about consumption, the tactic at the center of their campaigns, in their suspicion of pleasure, in their valorization of sacrifice, they were not just uncertain early adopters of new tactics, but forerunners of consumer activists’ defining ambivalence toward consumer society.

I. Continuities in Revolutionary Consumer Activism

When did consumer activism begin? According to Breen, the “consumer boycott was a brilliantly American invention,” an “innovative strategy” that took root during the period leading to the Revolution. Breen is correct to note the importance of America in this period as central to the emergence of consumer activism. His declaration of the “utter novelty” of their actions, however, needs to be qualified.⁵ Too often, scholars emphasize only the new and distinctive aspects of the Revolutionary boycotters. They generally do not look backward to find precedents, nor do they look forward to understand deviations from patterns that the consumer activists of the 1760s and 1770s established. In this view, the Revolutionaries are best understood as men and women ahead of their time, so far advanced that their key practice was only named in the nineteenth century. “A boycott was such a novel idea that the very word would not be coined for almost another century,” as Adam Hochschild writes.⁶ What these views minimize, however, is that the patriots were as much inheritors of an old tradition of consumer activism as inventors of a new one. As Sidney Tarrow, a scholar of American social movements, notes, the “colonists brought with them a repertoire of collective action from early modern Europe, and as the political conflict with the mother country gathered force in the early 1760s, their first responses were traditional.” J. Franklin Jameson, whose 1926 book The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement inspired the title of this chapter, concretely illustrated this general point when he observed that during the nonimportation era “the spinning wheel came into renewed use in every household.”⁷ Consumer politics of the Revolutionary era was poised between traditional forms of consumer protest that long predated it and the modern forms that American consumer activism eventually took.

Revolutionary activists did not invent the tactic of the boycott; that came earlier. Nor did they coin the term; that came later. The colonists who organized and participated in the nonimportation movement beginning in 1764 were not the first to promote the tools of consumer protest, although, as we shall see, they were the first to lead a social movement based on these principles and they also elaborated and publicized those tools in significant new ways, for they established the enduring principle that an unpublicized boycott was not really a boycott at all. We tend to think of consumption as a modern concern and of consumer politics as a recent development. However, consumption was a central mode of political engagement for ordinary people long before other forms of politics, such as voting, became available to them. In the medieval borough, R. H. Tawney writes, consumption “held primacy in the public mind.” In the eighteenth century, as E. P. Thompson has noted, “the consumer defended his old notion of right as stubbornly as . . . he defended his craft status as an artisan.” Long before the American colonists revolted, some residents of another British colony, Ireland, proposed that their compatriots take up the nonconsumption of British-made goods as a political tactic. The most famous salvo in this aborted campaign was Jonathan Swift’s 1720 essay A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture. The essayist called upon his compatriots, “Male and Female never to appear with one Single Shred that comes from England.” Instead, he promoted a vision in which the Irish would be “universally clad in their own Manufacture.” No social movement followed Swift’s suggestion, although in the 1770s, Irish societies, imitating the American colonists, formed to enforce nonimportation of British goods.⁸ So Americans of the 1760s were not the first to develop the logic of nonimportation, although they were the first to implement it successfully.

Nor were the colonists the first to adopt consumer tactics as political weapons. Throughout the eighteenth century, food riots were common in Europe. These food rioters possessed a “highly-sensitive consumer-consciousness.” Such riots were not absent in colonial America, where a series of bread riots took place in Boston, Philadelphia, and other colonial cities in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. In 1713, for example, a crowd of Bostonians destroyed the grain of the merchant Andrew Belcher, whom many poor residents perceived as charging exorbitant prices.⁹

Similarly, American colonists employed the tactic of ostracism, a practice with roots in classical Greece and ancient Christianity.¹⁰ They continued the tradition of casting out of the community what a group of Boston residents described in 1775 as “villains that are inimical to the cause of liberty.”¹¹ In a communal society that deeply valued the thick bonds of neighborliness, the threat of social isolation was grave. As noted in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1765, the punishment to “let him be alone in the world—let him wish to associate with the wild beasts of some dark, loathsome cave” was literally to excommunicate him or her.¹² Colonists who supported British imperial measures, from the Stamp Act to the Intolerable Acts, routinely faced the wrath of their neighbors, who punished them through isolation. For example, in 1765, citizens in Essex County, New Jersey, declared that they would have “no Communication with any such Person, nor speak to them on any Occasion, unless it be to inform them of their Vileness.”¹³ A group of Bostonians promised eight years later that those who drank British tea would be “treated as wretches unworthy to live, and will be made the first Victims of our Just Resentment.”¹⁴ To be sure, the colonists put an American spin on ostracism and other “rituals of public humiliation,” particularly in their use of the tactic of tarring and feathering.¹⁵ But this shaming remained, as it had in earlier societies, a function of face-to-face contact and aimed at personal humiliation and communal condemnation.¹⁶ Later generations grew to embrace less visible, more distant forms of politics that relied upon commercial rather than neighborly networks and devalued symbolic acts, although these never went away entirely.

Practitioners of ostracism and humiliation sought not only to punish but also to induce personal redemption and conversion. Later generations of boycotters, by contrast, aimed to punish malefactors and to force them to change their ways. Caring little or not at all whether their targets had undergone a soul-searing conversion, they sought a tangible change in economic behavior. Not so the Revolutionaries. For example, the residents of several Boston-area communities in 1773 vowed to ostracize Eleazer Bradshaw, an unrepentant tea purchaser, “until there appears a reformation in said Bradshaw.” Similarly, a group in Augusta County, Virginia, promised “to have no further dealings, connection, or intercourse” with one Alexander Miller, who apparently had impugned the motives of the Continental Congress. They aimed to catalyze “his sincere repentance of his past folly.” With these “testimonials of repentance,” as the historian Pauline Maier calls them, the protesters drew from the past as much as they pointed to the future. They employed shame-based rather than market-based forms of punishment.¹⁷

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An American Political Tradition
• Part I: The Birth of Consumer Activism
• Part II: The Birth of the Consumer Movement
• Part III: Advocates and Activists: Consumer Activism since World War II
• Epilogue Consumer Activism Comes Full Circle
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index