Black Power of the Purse

A Consumers' Republic:
The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

LIZABETH COHEN
Alfred A Knopf New York Jan03

African Americans in the urban North also mobilized politically as consumers during the 1930s, and in ways unique to their racial situation. By boycotting some merchants while favoring others, organizing cooperatives, and undertaking other kinds of consumer activism, African Americans asserted themselves in the retail marketplace on an unprecedented scale. Faced with devastating economic hardship from the Great Depression, northern blacks-most of whom were relative newcomers to the region's cities-had little recourse. They were already enthusiastically exercising the franchise, an important attraction of northern residence, and by 1936 shifted the majority of their votes from the Republicans to the Democrats, helping to ensure the survival of New Deal relief programs upon which many depended. As they were disproportionately losing jobs in the private sector, giving them the highest rates of unemployment in many cities, organizing at the workplace made little sense, until later in the 1930s when they could join the CIO's larger offensive.[47] The Communist Party offered some immediate help against tenant evictions and relief discrimination, but full-fledged membership in this Moscow-oriented political organization appealed to only a small number of northern blacks .[48]

A remaining, and promising, resource was African-American spending power. If properly channeled, it could be a powerful club for demanding jobs and fairer treatment from white store owners and a way of favoring black-owned businesses and cooperatives, whose greater profits would then circulate in black communities. Black residents of every major northern city and racial leaders of diverse political persuasions, ranging from the "conservative" spokesmen of the National Negro Business League to the more "radical" National Negro Congress and the well-known Socialist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) W.E.B. Du Bois, recognized over the course of the thirties the benefits of politicizing African-American consumers on a mass scale.

If African-American consumer activism reached a new height during the 1930s, it grew from deep roots. Several historical efforts to improve black circumstances through consumer action prepared the ground. The consumer boycott was the major strategy with which blacks had protested on a mass scale the imposition of Jim Crow laws in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly those mandating the segregation of trolley cars in all major southern cities. Although the streetcar boycotts failed, the fact that the determination of thousands of black riders had managed to deprive urban transit companies of profits for periods ranging from a few weeks to a couple years, and even to drive a few into bankruptcy, remained an important memory of resistance passed on from generation to generation. When black leaders in Lynchburg, Virginia, condemned a new segregation law relegating blacks to the back of trolley cars as "a gratuitous insult ... to every one with a drop of Negro blood," and urged a boycott to "touch to the quick the white man's pocket. 'Tis there his conscience lies," they helped create a model for retaliating against discrimination in the purchase of goods and services through withdrawing consumer patronage.[49]

Even where boycotts were not feasible because African Americans depended on the monopoly or credit a local merchant controlled, relations with southern white merchants proved fraught with tension, making retail exchange a moment when blacks expected, and resented, economic exploitation and racial discrimination. As farmers they were caught in merchants' claws of credit and debt. Even beyond that, as the national consumer market extended its reach into the South by the turn of the century, blacks fell victim to southern whites' elaborate Jim Crowism in settings of consumption and leisure such as stores, restaurants, and movie theaters, as whites came to fear that the growing availability, and inherent democracy, of commodities could undermine their own superior social status. Although after the Civil War African Americans throughout the nation legally had full economic rights in a free market, black consumption of material goods and services soon became limited by the same white anxiety about blacks' proper place in racial and class hierarchies that constrained their working and voting.[50]

The institutionalization of segregation in the late-nineteenth-century South fueled another response among African Americans that ultimately contributed to the consumer activism of the 1930s: the drive for separate black-owned businesses. As Booker T. Washington conceptualized it when he brought together leading clergy and businessmen of the era to found the National Negro Business League in 1900, black business enterprise promised economic as well as racial progress. Washington said in his opening address, "Whenever I have seen a black man who was succeeding in his business, who was a taxpayer, and who possessed intelligence and high character, that individual was treated with the highest respect by the members of the white race. In proportion as we can multiply these examples, North and South, will our problem be solved."[51] "Negro captains of industry," Washington and his followers thought, would bring blacks their fair share of the fruits of American capitalism: profits, jobs, and social prestige. By the 1920s the need for "Negro businessmen" had evolved into a broader call for a "separate black economy," whose success depended as much on committed black consumers as ambitious black entrepreneurs. With the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities creating a vast "Negro market" of thousands of people solidly massed in compact communities, black purchasing power could hold the key to the race's prosperity. Advocates of a black economy had also widened beyond conservative businessmen to include black nationalists and socialist-leaning "New Negroes," all of whom believed that racial solidarity in the marketplace would buy black economic and social power along with material comforts.[52]

Ironically, the heir to political accommodationist Washington as champion of black capitalism during the 1920s was Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey. Only a few years before the onset of the Great Depression, Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association sponsored numerous black-run commercial enterprises-a Black Star Line of steamships to transport African-American settlers to Garvey's proposed African nation and then to carry on trade with the motherland; chains of restaurants, groceries, hotels, and laundries; and a printing plant, a black doll factory, and other industrial ventures. Although these enterprises collapsed with Garvey's conviction and deportation from the United States for mail fraud, his movement's several million supporters were nonetheless exposed to a message perhaps more lasting than "back to Africa": African-American salvation through selling and buying black.

African Americans thus met the crisis of the Great Depression familiar with the potential use of their purchasing power for political ends. But their mobilization as consumers during the 1930s reached an entirely new level of intensity. Despite the extended discourse about consumer boycotting and black capitalism over the previous three decades, success had been limited. Jim Crow continued to preside over the purchase of goods and services in the South and was surprisingly present in the North as well. Except for a few large insurance companies, "race businesses" mostly consisted of small groceries and proprietorships in trades where whites had little interest in competing, such as barbershops and funeral homes. In fact, compared to most ethnic groups, African Americans were substantially underrepresented in business ownership for their presence in the population. Severe shortages of capital and credit plagued businessmen's entrepreneurial efforts, making it difficult for them to offer customers the merchandise selection, low prices, and credit terms that white shopkeepers in black neighborhoods could. A lack of business experience likewise limited their competitiveness. Hence, an unusually high failure rate among African-American-owned businesses made Garvey's short-lived enterprises typical. Not surprisingly, only a fraction of black consumers' dollars ever found their way into black merchants' pockets.[54]

Consumer activism among African Americans during the Great Depression took a number of forms. Most dramatic was a new kind of consumer protest that erupted in the late 1920s in Chicago, considered the economic capital of black America, and spread like wildfire into other northern cities during the 1930s. "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" or "Spend Your Money Where You Can Work" campaigns demanded that white store owners hire black employees if they wanted patronage, and profits, from black customers. According to St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis, a landmark study of Chicago's African-American community during the 1930s, "The first organized reaction [to the Depression] within Black Metropolis was a movement directed against white men who did business in the Black Belt. A group of ragged pickets walking in front of a Black Belt chain store in the fall of 1929 signalized the beginning of a movement which stirred Black Metropolis as nothing had since the Race Riot." When that grocery chain relented, the target shifted to Woolworth's, which eventually agreed that a quarter of its employees in "Negro neighborhoods" would be black; Sears, Roebuck, A & P, Walgreens Drugs, and other stores followed suit, welcoming back customers with "We Employ Colored Salesmen" signs in their windows. Over three thousand new, mostly white-collar jobs resulted, a victory achieved through ordinary people's determination, and financial and moral support from black churches, lodges, community organizations, and particularly the militant Chicago Whip newspaper. Chicago Black Belt residents, moreover, not only demanded that African-American salesclerks be hired, but that their skin be dark enough for their racial identity to be unmistakable.[55]

Harlem residents, like African Americans in many other cities, used their purchasing power as consumers to pressure merchants to hire blacks as store clerks, not just as janitors and elevator operators, and to demand fairer treatment as customers. (Courtesy of Programs and Playbills Collection, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 

Before long, the movement spread to Baltimore, Washington, Newark, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Oakland, and even south to Richmond, Virginia, in each city promoted by a different, often fragile alliance of self-interested black capitalists, the black middle-class establishment, and black nationalists with predominantly working-class followings.[56]

In the spring of 1934, the campaign finally made its way to Harlem, where protesters targeted the community's largest department store, L. M. Blumstein's, in the center of Harlem's famed 125th Street shopping district. Although Blumstein's made 75 percent of its sales to blacks, the store's owners had refused to hire them as clerks or cashiers, only as elevator operators and porters. After weeks of facing picketers, attacks by the New York Age newspaper, and a successful boycott waged by more than three hundred allied churches, clubs, and house-to-house delegations urging "stay out of Blumstein's," the owners capitulated, to the elation of thousands of picketers who marched in a victory parade through heavy rain and then moved on to their next target.

At the end of 1934, however, local courts ruled in merchants' favor that picketing in the absence of a labor dispute was illegal, and the "Don't Buy" campaign was forced to retreat. By the following March, Harlemites remained so incensed about the racial discrimination surrounding consumption that when a sixteen-year-old boy was apprehended for stealing a cheap pocketknife from S. H. Kress's Five-and-Dime store on 125th Street (where picketing had led to the grudging hiring of a few black clerks, who were subsequently transferred to the lunch counter), the rumor spread that he had been beaten and then that he had been killed. Within hours, a full-scale riot broke out, an attack by upwards of ten thousand people upon the mostly white-owned businesses that lined 125th Street. Three deaths, scores of arrests, hundreds of broken windows, and the looting of hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of goods resulted. The small number of black-owned stores, and even a few white-owned ones known to employ blacks, were spared.

Three years later, after the legality of consumer boycotting and picketing was affirmed by a United States Supreme Court ruling, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who had supported the Blumstein's boycott from the pulpit of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, revived the campaign under the auspices of a new organization, the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment. Together with other community groups, it brought enough consumer pressure to bear (Powell claimed over 200 organizations and 170,000 members) to secure an agreement with the Uptown Chamber of Commerce that all Harlem stores under its jurisdiction would increase the proportion of blacks among their white-collar workers to at least one-third and promote them equitably with whites.[57]

By then, Harlem consumers were flexing their economic muscle in other ways as well. Tenants undertook rent strikes and looked to the recently founded Consolidated Tenants League of Harlem to push grievances against white landlords; riders boycotted the Fifth Avenue Bus Company for refusing to hire black drivers and conductors; Consolidated Edison was forced to employ its first black workers in nonmenial jobs after Powell's coordinating committee shut off Harlem's lights one night a week, urging people to burn candles instead, and led "bill-payers' parades" to pay bills in pennies.[58] In far-flung parts of the country, African-American consumers likewise extended their boycott targets from stores to other public sites and services, such as movie theaters and public utilities, though their smaller share of a theater or telephone company's market often limited their leverage.[59]

While the "Don't Buy" campaigns succeeded in creating thousands of new positions, hundreds of thousands of urban blacks remained un- or underemployed. Nonetheless, this very visible strategy had enormous symbolic impact. People became convinced that African-American purchasing power truly meant power, and other efforts to tap it emerged. Most notable was a resurgence of interest in founding black businesses and a renewed confidence that black consumer spending could keep them viable. Supporters included not only established leaders of the black business community and the growing number of individuals who were setting their hopes, along with their meager savings, on a small business; new voices also emerged. W.E.B. Du Bois proposed new consumer strategies as part of his fundamental shift from the NAACP's traditional emphasis on integration to black separatism, a move that so alienated many of his NAACP colleagues that he consequently resigned membership in the organization that he had helped to found. Du Bois argued for supporting independent black economic enterprises through a policy of "voluntary segregation." It was a mistake, he wrote in 1931, "to think the economic cycle begins with production, rather it begins with consumption." Later he expanded, "The consuming power of 2,800,000 Negro families has recently been estimated at $166,000,000 a month-a tremendous power when intelligently directed.... With the use of their political power, their power as consumers, and their brain power ... Negroes can develop in the United States an economic nation within a nation, able to work through inner cooperation, to found its own institutions, to educate its genius."[60]

Despite the poverty and unemployment rampant in northern black communities during the depression, the total number of black retail stores aimed at black consumers grew from about 23,000 in 1935 to almost 30,000 in 1939, nurtured through a mixture of entrepreneurial self-interest and a more broadly held ideological commitment to economic separatism. Over the same period, service establishments like cleaners and beauty parlors rose from 22,000 to 27,000. Although profits fell for many black, as for white merchants, more individuals chose to try their luck at the "depression businesses" they often set up in their houses or basements. "If worst came to worst, I would at least have something to eat," one black entrepreneur explained.[61]

In Chicago, a fervor developed around black business during the second half of the 1930s. New journals were launched, such as the Southside Business and Professional Review and Colored Merchant and Caterer. Black ministers preached from their pulpits on behalf of the "Double Duty Dollar" that simultaneously purchased a commodity and advanced the race. Their message: "Patronize your own, for that is the only way we as a race will ever get anywhere." Owners of black businesses in Chicago even sponsored a two-day Exposition of Negro Business in 1938, as Time magazine put it, "to spur Negro business and arrange a program to fight `fleecing' by whites." After heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis cut the entrance ribbon, 110,000 attendees "watched fashion shows, fingered fancy caskets, saw demos of pressing kinks out of Negro hair, listened to church choirs, and hot bands, munched free handouts or purchased raffle tickets from 75 booths."" All the excitement, however, was not enough to overcome the longstanding impediments to black business success. It was estimated in 1940 that black enterprises controlled fewer than 20 percent of total retail business in Chicago's black neighborhoods, although that surpassed the national average of 5 to 10 percent.[63] 

One of the major obstacles to black business success that the National Negro Business League boldly addressed during the early 1930s was the growing threat of chain stores to independent groceries, the largest category of black enterprise. In a bold initiative, the league launched a nationwide effort to organize independent stores into a "voluntary chain," the Colored Merchants' Association (CMA). To help small-store owners compete more successfully against the grocery chains, the CMA purchased goods in volume to get lower prices from wholesalers, offered grocers training in modern merchandising methods, installed a uniform system of accounting in member stores, and advertised cooperatively. For these services, members paid dues of $5 a week. CMA's stores spread from its birthplace in Montgomery to Birmingham, Selma, Jackson, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Richmond, Hampton, Winston-Salem, Nashville, Louisville, Detroit, Chicago, Tulsa, and Omaha. Each city had a minimum of ten stores and many had substantially more. After operating for two years in Harlem, for example, CMA had twenty-three member stores and two model stores. The next year, 1932, the CMA opened a warehouse there to sell canned goods, coffee, flour, and other products with the CMA label to its New York stores. Despite the CMA's seeming success, however, by 1936 it was bankrupt, victim to a complicated combination of woes including the depression economy, wholesaler pressure on small grocers, and the difficulties of running a national retail cooperative of regionally diverse and often inexperienced grocers.[64]

Not all proponents of a separate black economy were comfortable championing capitalism, arguing that an exploiter with a black face differed very little from one with a white face. They advocated black-owned cooperatives, a kind of retail structure that was popular in other progressive circles as well during the 1930s. Du Bois was the best-known proponent of black cooperatives as a strategy for achieving black economic power without collaborating in the corruptions of capitalism. Long sympathetic to cooperatives in theory, Du Bois became a committed promoter as he searched for ways of coping with the devastations of the Great Depression. "The habit and order of cooperation," he argued in 1936, would help the black race build a new social order based on consumers' cooperation, democracy, and socialism and provide a "guide for the rise of the working classes throughout the world." Du Bois's commitment went beyond rhetoric to concrete efforts to establish cooperatives. He was frustrated with the demise of the CMA, which he blamed on its failure to tap into black "buying power [that] could only be held in loyalty to business if it shared the profit." To promote cooperativism, he traveled around the country speaking at symposia like one in Chicago entitled "Cooperatives-A Way Out for the Negro?"[65]

The Chicago area already had several cooperatives. Three were operating in the city: the most successful, the People's Consumer Co-operative; the Open Eye Consumer's Cooperative, affiliated with the Pilgrim Baptist Church; and the Citizen's Non-Partisan Cooperative Organization of Olivet Baptist Church, a study group and buying club. In nearby Gary, Indiana, a flourishing cooperative, Consumers' Cooperative Trading Association, boasted two thousand members, two food stores, and a full program of study groups and classes on cooperativism. Within a few years, the Ladies Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, based in Chicago, would give black cooperativism an added boost when it promoted Brotherhood Consumer Cooperative Buying Clubs in that city and among Ladies Auxiliary locals elsewhere, as, in Brotherhood founder A. Philip Randolph's words, "the best mechanism yet devised to bring about economic democracy."66

Harlem saw cooperatives come and go over the decade, though by the late 1930s and early 1940s survival rates improved as people with stabler incomes showed more interest. Harlem was also the headquarters of the Young Negroes' Cooperative League (YNCL), founded by journalist George Schuyler, which established stores, buying clubs, and other cooperative ventures in black neighborhoods throughout the nation. The league's national director was a young Ella Baker, later, in the 1940s, to become a staff member of the NAACP and later still, in the late 1950s, the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In fact, cooperativism provided a fertile training ground for civil rights activist Baker. Her vitae from the late 1930s lists, in addition to her league stint, "Special Studies in Consumer Problems, Community Building, and Housing" at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and New York University; a scholarship to the Cooperative Institute of the Cooperative League of America; service as director of the Consumer Education Division, Works Progress Administration; chairman of education and publicity for the successful Harlem's Own Cooperative, Inc.; and a multitude of other speaking and organizing activities around cooperativism and consumer issues more broadly. For activists searching for creative ways to promote black self-determination in the 1930s, cooperatives generated much hope and excitement, if not huge memberships. They offered a more radical alternative to black capitalism. Combined with consumer boycotts, they made "organizing at the point of consumption" a viable racial strategy.[67]

The influential role played by the Sleeping Car Porters' Ladies Auxiliaries and civil rights activist Ella Baker in establishing cooperatives highlights the importance of African-American women in consumer organizing during the 1930s and early 1940s. Black women, like their white equivalents, held the purse strings in their households, so much so, that black merchants felt women customers controlled their fate: "They shop for the whole house and they easily influence the men in their spending.... Negro women are responsible for the success or failure of Negroes in business," complained a Chicago business leader.[68]

But black women's influence as consumers went beyond that. Throughout the country during the 1930s, they established Housewives' Leagues, sometimes under the auspices of local Urban Leagues, whose major focus was consumer organizing. The Detroit Housewives' League was the first to be founded and the largest. Organized with fifty members in June 1930 by Fannie B. Peck after she had been inspired by a lecture describing how Harlem housewives had supported local CMA stores, the Detroit league swelled by the end of 1935 to over 12,000 members who were divided into sixteen neighborhood units. Members pledged to support black businesses and professionals, buy black-produced products, and help train Detroit's young people for careers in business.[69] The Baltimore Housewives' League, with its reported membership of 2000, was a key coalition participant in that city's "Buy Where You Can Work" boycott.[70] In New York, the "Don't Buy" campaign was initially launched by the Harlem Housewives' League, which claimed over a thousand members as early as 1931. The league undertook a preliminary survey of black patronage of white stores to expose the unfair return in jobs, and lobbied Harlem housewives to trade only at CMA stores or other businesses that employed blacks. Later in the 1930s, Harlem's Dunbar Housewives' League sponsored the Harlem's Own Cooperative on West 136th Street.[71] Housewives' Leagues flourished as well in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, featuring in many of these places a mix of working- and middle-class members in a notable break with the middle-class-dominated black women's club movement. A National Housewives' League of America was established in 1933 and promoted its own nationwide "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaign, but its influence was considerably weaker than that of locally based leagues.[72]

Black women, already mobilized as consumers in their own communities, united with white women to carry out the meat boycotts of 1935. In June of that year, on the heels of the March riot, black women in Harlem joined the meat boycott launched in Jewish neighborhoods and brought by Communist Party members to Harlem. Moving from butcher shop to butcher shop in "flying squadrons" of between three hundred and a thousand women, they threatened butchers with a "repetition of March 19" if they failed to reduce their prices. More than three hundred Harlem butcher shops agreed to close for four days at the angry women's insistence to help put pressure on the packers. Not surprisingly, the Communist Daily Worker reported that the meat strike in Harlem "was carried through more successfully than in any other section of the city," and indeed the inflated meat prices of Harlem's butchers were reported to have declined by as much as 50 percent after the protests.[73] Accounts of the meat boycott in most major cities refer to the participation of black women, many of whom were probably members of Housewives' Leagues or similar organizations. In fact, black women's prior experience with grassroots consumer boycotts through the "Don't Buy" campaigns very likely helped inspire the larger female mobilization during 1935. When African-American consumer activist Ella Baker and others like her participated in mainstream consumer organizations such as the Consumers' National Federation, the Cooperative League of America, and the New York Consumers Council, they undoubtedly made a crucial link between races.[74]

Black women protesters were also pivotal in pushing consumer demands beyond jobs. For example, in Brooklyn, a female-dominated organization committed to fighting job discrimination by store owners in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant challenged as well their disrespectful behavior toward black customers. In 1933 they collected a large number of signatures accusing the manager of the local Bohack Supermarket of sexual harassment. When top management refused to fire him, they retaliated with a boycott.[75] in Pittsburgh, the Housewives' Cooperative League made breaking down Jim Crowism a top priority alongside supporting black business, pressuring white business to employ blacks, and facilitating cooperative buying. Business concerns that refused service to blacks were to be denounced on lists distributed "to every Negro home in the city."[76] These consumer actions lend good support to historian Elsa Barkley Brown's notion that politicized African-American women often exhibited a "womanist" consciousness that seamlessly interwove their gender and racial identities.[77] Black female consumer activists of the 1930s were neither more black nor more female in their loyalties; they blended both. Feminist hopes for securing good salesclerk jobs for women and demonstrating female political solidarity were inseparable from the effort to improve working and living conditions for the race through "directed spending."

When a young Ella Baker addressed the first national conference of the YNCL in 1931 on the topic "What Consumers' Co-operation Means to Negro Women," she anticipated that African Americans' new assertiveness as consumers during the 1930s would require a special commitment from black women.[78] Consumer activism among African Americans was less of an exclusively female activity than among whites, but black women's organizational skills and experience certainly ensured its success, propelling it more into the mainstream of politics in African-American communities than in white ones.

African-American grassroots consumer activism in the 1930s differed from the predominantly white consumer movement in significant ways. Whereas white, usually female, activists sought to protect consumers' rights to everything from lower prices to reliable product information to protection from hazardous goods, blacks used consumer power primarily as a means to secure their rights as producers. Blacks, moreover, aimed less at representing some general public interest and winning the federal government's support for their demands than at improving concrete economic conditions in northern black communities. Long used to solving problems on their own, African Americans brought tremendous economic pressure to bear on local white capitalists, while favoring black businesses wherever possible, turning familiar strategies of economic self-help and self-sufficiency into a new kind of black mass politics during the thirties. It was a mass politics, furthermore, aimed at taking advantage of the de facto racial segregation of urban communities. Although carried out as protests against white exploitation, "Don't Shop Where You Can't Work" and black capitalism and cooperativism nonetheless depended on residential segregation. The concentration of black consumers in specific neighborhoods was required to make their market pressure felt.

At the same time, black consumer activism shared common ground with other grassroots consumer movements. Despite a lack of attention to shaping federal policy, grassroots consumer campaigners felt part of national efforts to maximize their spending power. "Don't Buy," the CMA, and the Housewives' Leagues were all local efforts with strong national connections. At a planning meeting for a Pittsburgh Housewives' Cooperative League in 1937, for example, participants referred frequently to the experiences of leagues elsewhere, such as St. Louis's success getting black milkmen, Cleveland's support for black-owned gasoline stations, and Los Angeles's lobbying for General Electric and five-and-ten-cent stores in the black district.[79] Moreover, blacks' initial concern with jobs, much like female consumer activists' original protests over meat prices, broadened to include other kinds of consumer discontents, such as indignities suffered from racist white clerks, discrimination in other public places, and unfair rent and utility rates. But in the case of both blacks and women consumer rebels, discontents rarely involved challenging the legitimacy of capitalism. Except for ideologically committed cooperators and the relatively small, though influential coterie of Communist Party members active in consumer organizing, participants simply sought a fairer shake.

Most significantly, by mobilizing as consumers, African Americans participated in a broader political culture of dissent where "the consumer" became viewed as a legitimate and effective agent of protest, particularly for women and blacks who were marginalized from the mainstream of politics and the labor movement. In contrast to electoral and producer power, the strength of consumer power lay not so much with permanent organizations as with the potential for mobilizing mass action by individual consumers. Although depression-era blacks did not link the economic rights of the consumer to the political rights of the citizen nearly as much as women consumer activists did or as they would a few years later in the context of World War II, the seeds were planted: a slogan in the Chicago buying campaign was "Use your buying power as you use your ballot," while the Harlem group that led the boycott of Blumstein's called itself the Citizens' League for Fair Play and appealed for the support of the "self-respecting citizens of Harlem "[80] Demanding that the state defend citizen consumers' rights in the economic and political spheres was an obvious next step that the heightened expectations of wartime would encourage.

Notes

47. Cigler and Loomis, Interest Group Politics, p. 28; Robert Lampman, "The New Frontier and the Consumer Interest," prepared for delivery at Council on Consumer Information, Mar. 22, 1963, Washington, DC, Margolius, Box 4, folder "Consumer Counsel-Federal," p. 9.

48. Creighton, Pretenders to the Throne, p. 55; Marylin Bender, "Capitalism LivesEven in Naderland," NYT, Jan. 7, 1973, in Kelley, New Consumerism, p. 68.

49. Robert D. Putnam laments the loss of what he considers valuable "social capital" with this decline: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), pp. 48-64. Other scholars of civic engagement, such as Theda Skocpol, note the same shift but assess its impact differently: Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), particularly Jeffrey M. Berry, "The Rise of Citizen Groups," pp. 367-93.

50. Sandra L. Willett, "Elements of an Effective Corporate Consumer Affairs Program: An Overview of Selected Consumer Programs in Large Service-Oriented Companies," prepared for Aetna Life and Casualty by the National Consumers' League, July 30, 1982, Angevine, Box 5, D-4, p. 1; Moss quoted in "Part I: Crusade for the '70s: The Consumer Revolution: An Angry Public Strikes Back," The Express, Jan. 9, 1970. The more mainstream management guru Peter Drucker, criticizing the plethora of low-quality, overpriced, and hazardous goods on the market, recognized the same grassroots revolt: "We have been a very patient people by and large. Now people are fed up, and I do not blame them"; quoted in "The U.S.'s Toughest Customer," Time, Dec. 12, 1969, p. 92.

51. Peterson interview with NYT reporter in "Housewives' Friend: Esther Eggertsen Peterson," NYT Nov. 5, 1966; also see "Boycotts Backed by Johnson Aide," NYT, Oct. 28, 1966. Photograph of Peterson hugging Denver boycotter in "FOOD: Behind the Boycotts, Why Prices Are High," Time, Nov. 4, 1966. The documentation for the so-called housewives' protests of 1966-67 is extensive in the contemporary press; among the most helpful articles are "Margolius Tells It as It Is: How Business Backlash Toppled Esther Peterson," Co-op Highlights, April 1967, pp. 1-2; Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Action 1 (July I, 1967): 4-5; Rita Lang Kleinfelder, When We Were Young: A BabyBoomer Yearbook (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1993), p. 420; and from NYT: "Food Price Rises Stir Resentment, Cost-Conscious Consumers Rebelling with Boycotts and Selective Selling" and "Market Gives In, Will Cut Prices," Oct. 16, 1966; "Denver Housewives Boycott Markets," Oct. 18, 1966; "Housewives' Revolt Against Rising Food Prices Spreads Across the Nation," Oct. 23, 1966; "Food-Price Rises Laid to Retailers and Processors," Oct. 26, 1966; "Food Chain Executives Pledge to Join Housewives in Fight on High Prices," Oct. 27, 1966; "U.S. Studies Price Impact of Food Store Promotions," Oct. 29, 1966; "Supermarket Price Protest Spreads to 21 States," Oct. 30, 1966; "G.O.P. Fears Food Boycott Weakens Its Inflation Issue," Nov. 2, 1966; "The Housewife vs. the Supermarket," Nov. 6,1966; "The Merchant's View, Retailers Wonder If Food-Price Revolt Is Spreading," Nov. 20, 1966; "Housewives Look Back on Boycotts," Mar. 5, 1967. And from WSJ: "Several Food Store Chains Slash Prices in Midwest to Woo Complaining Shopper," Oct. 12, 1966; "Bring Home No Bacon: Housewives' Boycotts of Food Chains Grow," Oct. 20, 1966; "Housewives' Rebellion Spreads; More Chains Reduce Food Prices," Oct. 26, 1966; "Housewives' Price Protests Proliferate, Evoking Few Cuts but Much Commotion," Oct. 31, 1966; "Pleasing the Ladies: Supermarkets Attempt to Placate Housewives as Higher Prices Loom," June 26, 1967. 

That the Johnson White House's interest in consumers was an effort to appeal politically to suburban white women comes through very clearly in Peterson, Series 111-U.S. Government, 1961-69, and in Margolius, Box 4, folder "Consumer CounselFederal."

52. From the NYT.• "Boycott of Meat Begins with Leaders Optimistic," Apr. 2, 1973; "Consumers Scoff at Ceiling and Step Up Boycott Plans," Mar. 31, 1973; "Consumers, in Protest, Mailing Tapes from Supermarket Registers to Nixon," Apr. 30, 1973.

53. On the 1973 boycott, see "Meat Boycotting Begins to Make Headlines-Again," National Observer, Feb. 27, 1973; "Consumer Activists Urge Meat Boycott for April I-7," NYT, Mar. 17, 1973; "Consumer Mobilizing for a War on Food Prices," NYT, Mar. 18, 1973; "Consumer Resistance Starting to Affect Price of Food Here;" NYT, Mar. 24, 1973; "If Consumer Leagues Spring Up, Boycotts' Results Are Hard to Predict" and "The Roast Beef Rebellion," NYT, Mar. 25,1973; "Consumers Rally for Meat Boycotts," NYT, Mar. 30, 1973; "The Revolt of the Masses," NYT, Apr. I, 1973; "Meat Sales Drop 80% in Places as the Boycott Begins" and "Valid Boycott," NYT, Apr. 3, 1973; "Meat Group to Shoppers: `Please, Buy Something,"' NYT, Apr. 5, 1973; "Meat Retailers Say Boycott Slashed Sales but Prices Remain Tied to Wholesale Costs," WSJ, Apr. 9, 1973; "Shoppers Cut Meat Purchases to Protest Static Prices Here," NYT Apr. 30, 1973; "Remember Last Year's Irate Boycotters? They're Still Irate," National Observer, Feb. 23, 1974.

On the creation of the National Consumers Congress, see "Boycott Leaders Plan a Protest; Urge 2 Meatless Days a Week," NYT, Apr. 12, 1973, and "Consumer: Going to the Grassroots," Washington Star-News, Sept. 9, 1973; "Coke and Pepsi Boycott Called by Consumer Unit," NYT, June 11, 1973; Feldman, "Consumer Protection," p. 325.

54. I am grateful to Debra Michals for sharing material on the NOW campaign for the Equal Credit Opportunity Act that she gathered in two collections at the Schlesinger Library, both of which contain extensive letters from ordinary women: the Papers of Cynthia Harrison, chair of NOW's Women's Credit Task Force, and the Papers of NOW. In addition, see Commercial Credit Corporation, "A Survey of Women and Credit: How They Use It and What They Think," August-September 1978, Margolius, Box 5, folder "Credit"; "U.S. Seeks to End Mortgage Barriers Facing Women," NYT, Mar. 10, 1979; Lisa Cronin Wohl, "Equal Credit Opportunity Act: Some Good News, Some Not So Good," Ms., March 1977, pp. 95-98.

55. "The U.S.'s Toughest Customer," Time, Dec. 12, 1969, pp. 94, 96; "Consumers' Guardian: Virginia Harrington Wright Knauer," NYT, Apr. 10, 1969; "Consumer Drive at a Critical Stage," NYT, Oct. 5, 1970.

56. "Big motherism" from a speech by the Chamber of Commerce's Carl Madden, quoted in "Consumerism: Uphill Struggle," NYT Jan. 6, 1974; "Price `Girlcott' Is Starting Here," NYT, Oct. 28,1966. The one-time FBI agent turned private detective who was hired by GM to investigate Nader instructed his agents to "check Nader's life and current activities, to determine what makes him tick ... his marital status, his friends, his women, boys, etc." In reprinting this excerpt, Time noted, "They questioned why a 32-year-old man with adequate means should still be unmarried." Although no trace of homosexuality ever surfaced, suspicion long dogged Nader: "Investigations," Time, Apr. I, 1966; also see "The U.S. 's Toughest Customer," Time, Dec. 12, 1969. Gloria Steinern and Robin Morgan both recalled how the meat boycott of 1973 was tarred and feathered as "feminist": "At Home with Gloria Steinern: Decades as Icon; Now, Freedom," NYT, Feb. 9, 1995; Robin Morgan, "Rights of Passage," Ms., November 1975, reprinted in William H. Chafe and Harvard Sitkoff, eds., A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 247.

57. There is a great deal of documentation of blacks' using consumer pressure against discriminating employers during the 1960s. For example, see Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 229; "Yule Boycott Is Threatened in Negroes' Drive for Jobs," NN, Nov. 1, 1963; and in NYT.• "28 White Castles Will Be Picketed," July 21,1963; "Chicago Negroes Invade a Market," July 26,1968; "Pickets Demand Negro Manager at Harlem A. & P .,"Aug. 21,1968.

58. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley (New York: Grove, 1965), p. 313.

59. From NYT: "Negro Concern Sets Supermarket Chain," Feb. 8, 1967; "Interracial Council Starts Fund to Aid Negro Businesses Here" and "Co-op Store for Harlem," Dec. 21,1967; "Group Bids Blacks Avoid the A. & P.," Dec. 10, 1970; "22 Sit in at A. & P.'s Offices to Seek Help for Blacks," Jan. 28, 1971; "A Black Coalition Planned at A. & P.," Feb. 18, 1971; "69 Are Arrested in A. & P. Protests," Apr. 10, 1971. Later in the 1970s, Jackson's Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) similarly addressed consumer issues; Advertising Age ran an ad for a PUSH-sponsored "Black Consumer Behavioral Symposium," May 6, 1974.

60. "It Takes Only 10 to Start: Housewives United: A Merchant's Nightmare," Detroit News, Jan. 18,1970; "Voluntary Action Gets Results," CSM, Feb. 24,1970; "Consumer Rift Widens," Detroit News, Jan. 29,1971; and Consumers' Voice, CEPAs newspaper, Angevine, Box I, B-2; "22 Sit In at A. & P.'s Offices to Seek Help for Blacks," NYT, Jan. 28, 1971. The Harlem Consumer Education Council's boycott is discussed in "Price 'Girlcott' Is Starting Here," NYT, Oct. 28, 1966; for more on the council, see materials from its Sixth Annual Conference in 1968 in the SEDFRE, Box 51, Folder 19.

61. Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 51.

62. Television study cited in Report of the National Advisory Commission, p. 274; statement of Berkeley Burrell, president, National Business League, before the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Washington, DC, Oct. 23, 1967, Official Transcript of Proceedings, Johnson, Reel #5:0002-0007, p. 2832; looter quoted in Jim F. Heath, Decade of Disillusionment: The Kennedy-Johnson Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 250-51, cited in Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 160; Detroit participant quoted in Report of the National Advisory Commission, p. 133.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had recognized how television fed consumer desires as early as his historic "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written in spring 1963 in defense of the massive demonstrations to desegregate Birmingham. King listed among what he called the most "stinging darts of segregation" "when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children"; reprinted in Chafe and Sitkoff, eds., History of Our Time, p. 188.

There have been extensive debates among social scientists and historians about the identities of the ghetto rebels and their motives. A recently published, sound review of that literature and the available evidence by Jack M. Bloom concludes that the rioters were fairly representative of the black urban population and not a violent, hard-core ghetto underclass; "Ghetto Revolts, Black Power, and the Limits of the Civil Rights Coalition," in Raymond D'Angelo, The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and Interpretations (New York: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2001), pp. 383-408. Also see Kenneth L. Kusmer, ed., The Ghetto Crisis of the 1960s: Causes and Consequences, vol. 7 of Black Communities and Urban Development in America, 1720-1990 (New York: Garland, 1991).

63. My treatment of the Newark rebellion of 1967 is based on Report of the National Advisory Commission, pp. 56-69; Governor's Select Commission on Civil Disorder, State of New Jersey, Report for Action (Trenton: State of New Jersey, 1968), known as the Lilley Commission after its chair, Robert D. Lilley; in Lilley: Timeline of Newark Events from January-August 1967, Box 2; Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives, "Staff Report of Investigation, Involvement of Anti-Poverty Personnel in Newark, New Jersey, Racial Disturbances, 1967," Sept. 7, 1967, Box 3; "Special Report, July 1967 Riot, Completed 10-24-1967," Box 3, including arrest records; "Memorandum for the File, From: Sanford M. Jaffe and Robert B. Goldmann, Subject: Meeting with Mr. Russell Sackett, Reporter on Life Magazine," Dec. 15, 1967, Box 3; from NYT: "Newark Violence Breaks Out Again," July 14, 1967; "Hughes Observes Looting of Stores," July 15, 1967; "In Riots' Shadow, a City Stumbles On," July 14, 1997. Also, from the NN: "Riots, Mobs Loot, Start Fires," July 14, 1967; "Curfew Remains" and "Patrol Is Like WWII's, Guardsmen, Troopers with Guns at Ready," July 16,1967; "Tally on Rioting," July 22,1967; "Guard Troopers Called to Newark," NSL, July 14,1967; "Residents Claim State Police Hit Colored Shops" and "Orgy of Destruction Ravaged Newark; Sniper Fire Deadly," NJAA, July 22, 1967; "In a Grim City, a Secret Meeting with the Snipers," Life, July 28, 1967, pp. 27-28; Clement Alexander Price, ed., Freedom Not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1980), pp. 255-57, 288-90; Daniel Earl Georges, "Arson: The Ecology of Urban Unrest in an American City-Newark, New Jersey, a Case Study in Collective Violence" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1974), pp. 112-16; Thomas A. Johnson, "Newark's Summer '67' The Crisis 74 (August-September 1967); 371-79; Joseph M. Conforti, "Newark: Ghetto or City?" Society 9 (May 1972): 20-32.

64. Quoted in "Home-Grown Ills Cited by Negroes," NYT, July 16, 1967; "Shoppers and Carpenters Crowd Newark's Springfield Avenue, but the Angry Discontent Remains," NYT, July 27, 1967.

65. "Black People!" in "Three Poems by LeRoi Jones," Evergreen 11 (December 1967); 49. See discussion of Baraka's involvement in the Newark rebellion in Theodore R. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973), pp. 26-31; Imamu Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich, 1984), pp. 258-61, 269-72; Charlie Reilly, "An Interview with Amiri Baraka," in Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), pp. 252-54.

66. LeRoi Jones's testimony to the Lilley Commission, Nov. 27, 1967, Lilley, Box 7, pp. 83-84; Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, p. 260. For Philip Roth, the Jewish native Newark writer also discussed in Chapter 5, the 1967 rebellion represented final taps for the Jewish presence in Newark. In Roth's novel American Pastoral, his Jewish protagonist, Swede Levov, remembers sitting alone in his family's glove factory, surrounded by "looting crowds crazed in the street, kids carrying off radios and lamps and television sets, men toting armfuls of clothing, women pushing baby carriages heavily loaded with cartons of liquor and cases of beer, people pushing pieces of new furniture right down the center of the street, stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovensstealing not in the shadows but out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of the glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold." Although Swede refuses to abandon his factory, the business "entrusted to him by his father," he recognizes how unusual he is: "And then they left, everyone, fled the smoldering rubblemanufacturers, retailers, the banks, the shop owners, the corporations, the department stores; in the South Ward, on the residential blocks, there are two moving vans per day on every street throughout the next year, homeowners fleeing, deserting the modest houses they treasure for whatever they can get"; Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1997), pp. 268-70.

67. Quote in St. Clair Drake and Horace A. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), "Postscript 1969," p. 832; Audrey Olsen Faulkner et al., When I Was Comin' Up: An Oral History of Aged Blacks (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982), pp. 18, 58; Fred J. Cook, "Mayor Kenneth Gibson says-'Wherever the Central Cities Are Going, Newark Is Going to Get There First,"' NYT Magazine, July 25, 1971; Thomas R. Brooks, "Newark," Atlantic, August 1969, pp. 2-10; "Insurance Adjusters Assess Damage from Riots," NYT, July 18, 1967; "Unrest in Newark Doomed Motel Plan," NN, Apr. 13,1969; "Urban Areas Crave Return of Big Markets," NSL, July 17, 1984; "Where the Markets Are Never Super," NYT, June 6, 1992; "A Market Scores a Success in Newark," NYT Apr. 30, 1995. Harlem, with its 500,000 residents, had to wait until 1999 to get its first major supermarket in fifty years, a Pathmark store on 125th Street; "Harlem on the Cusp," NYT, Aug. 26, 2001.

The recent building of a new performing arts center in downtown Newark has spurred some economic revitalization, but debate still rages over the extent to which recovery has reached into the city's neighborhoods. The tense battle for mayor between incumbent Sharpe James and challenger Cory Booker in May 2002 revolved around this dispute. See "Newark's Competing Visions of Itself: Reborn or Struggling? Each View Is Reflected by a Mayoral Candidate," NYT, May 10, 2002, and Argelio R. Dumenigo, "Renewing Newark," Princeton Alumni Weekly, Apr. 10, 2002.

68. Although I had made the connection between the politics of consumption and the NWRO before I learned of her dissertation-in-progress, I am grateful to the pathbreaking work of Felicia Ann Kornbluh in developing this analysis in greater depth; see her "The Goals of the National Welfare Rights Movement: Why We Need Them Thirty Years Later," Feminist Studies 24 (Spring 1998): 65-78; "To Fulfill Their `Rightly Needs': Consumerism and the National Welfare Rights Movement," Radical History Review 69 (Fall 1997): 76-113; and her dissertation, "A Right to Welfare? Poor Women, Professionals, and Poverty Programs, 1935-1975" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000). Other useful sources include the very rich materials documenting the Welfare Rights Project in Newark, 1967-68, SEDFRE, Box 12, Folder 3; also on welfare rights organizing in Newark, memo to Sanford Jaffe (executive director, Governor's Commission on Civil Disorder), from Julia Miller, Oct. 23, 1967, Lilley, Box 3; and Guida West, The National Welfare Rights Movement: The Social Protest of Poor Women (New York: Praeger, 1981), p. 218. On welfare rights organizing more generally, see Jackie Pope, "Women in the Welfare Rights Struggle: The Brooklyn Welfare Action Council," in West and Rhoda Lois Blumberg, eds., Women and Social Protest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 57-74; Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization, Welfare Mothers Speak Out: We Ain't Gonna Shuffle Anymore (New York: Norton, 1972); Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 67-69.

69. George Wiley, "Testimony for the National Welfare Rights Organization Before the Fiscal Policies Sub-Committee of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress," June 12, 1968, Box 22, Folder 4, Papers of George Wiley, WHS, quoted in Kornbluh, "Goals of the National Welfare Rights Movement," p. 68.

70. James T. Patterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-1994 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 179, 197; Steve M. Teles, Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 20; both cited in Schudson, The Good Citizen, p. 263; City of New York, Department of Welfare, Reports June, July, August 1963-68, cited in Pope, "Women in the Welfare Rights Struggle."

71. Letter from Delores Hassell to Carl Rachlin, Apr. 26, 1967, in case of Delores Hassell, Box 47, Folder 149, SEDFRE, quoted in Kornbluh, "A Right to Welfare?" p. 340.

72. The nationwide credit campaigns of NWRO are well discussed in Kornbluh's "To Fulfill Their `Rightly Needs."'

73. Juliet Greenlaw, "Statement of National Welfare Rights Organization to the Democratic Platform Hearing," Aug. 16, 1968, Box 2101, file "Demo Platform Aug. 19, 1968;" NWRO Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, quoted in Kornbluh, "Goals of the National Welfare Rights Movement," p. 72; "Johnnie Tillmon Blackston, Welfare Reformer, Dies at 69," NYT, Nov. 27, 1995. Debate over how much consumer choice to give the poor-whether to offer cash relief or to control spending more closely-has a long history in welfare circles; see Viviana A. Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 143-216.

74. Mrs. Cassie B. Downer, "Guaranteed Adequate Income Now;" in Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization, Welfare Mothers Speak Out, p. 135.

75. On Nader's support among young people, and the growth of student-funded PIRGs, see Nadel, Politics of Consumer Protection, pp. 184-85; "The U.S.s Toughest Customer"; Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Newsletter, Nov. 25,1970, p. 2, on the Villanova meeting; Ignatius, "Stages of Nader," NYT Sunday Magazine, Jan. 18, 1976, p. 52; "Fighting for a Group to Fight for Consumers;" Newsday, n.d., Margolius, Box 4, Folder "Consumer Counsel"; and from NYT.• "350,000 Students in Research Groups Reported by Nader," Nov. 24, 1972; "Public Interest Research Groups on 138 Campuses Set to Fight Local Problems," Sept. 5, 1973; "College Based Consumer Advocates Keep Busy;" Aug. 18, 1974. On New Jersey PIRG activity, see "Middlesex Stores' Prices and Ad Policies Studied," NYT, July 2, 1973, and "College-Based Consumer Advocates Keep Busy,' NYT, Aug. 18, 1974; and from the "Q" Files, NPL: "NJPIRG, The First Five Years, 1972-1977;" New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, Citizen Action '76: One Year in Review (1976); New Jersey Public Interest Research Group Annual Report, 1977-1978. Also "Part I: Crusade for the '70s, The Consumer Revolution: An Angry Public Strikes Back," The Express, Jan. 9,1970; "Consumerism Is His Career: Bruce Charles Ratner;" NYT, Jan. 23, 1978.

76. Kiplinger Washington Letter quoted in Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Action 1 (October 1967): 11; "New Look," National Business Woman, February 1967; "Advertising: The Senator Asks Some Whys," NYT, Feb. 4,1970. Also see from NYT: "Retail Meeting Warned on Consumer," Jan. 11, 1972; "Consumers Spur Industry Response," Jan. 7, 1973; and "Consumer Activists Get Backing," May 18, 1974.

77. "A Proclamation for National Consumer Education Week [of Oct. 5, 1980] by President Jimmy Carter," Angevine, Box 7, Scrapbook; National Consumers' League, "Effective Consumer Participation: A Look at the Current Consumer Activist Movement: 1981," Angevine, Box 5, D-3; Report of the National Advisory Commission, p. 133; letter from Eugene May, president, Pike County Citizens Association, to Manager, Sears, Roebuck & Company, June 15, 1969, NWRO Papers, Howard, Box 2038, File "Local WRO Sears Material," quoted in Kornbluh, "To Fulfill Their `Rightly Needs,"' p. 90.

78. The citizen consumer ideal, that the consumer was "the symbol of the common interest," persisted throughout third-wave consumerism, even as the reality of consumer politics may have changed. This quote was from a luncheon address to the California Retailers Association and the Central City Association in Los Angeles by a progressive businessman, Charles Y. Lazarus, president of the American Retail Federation and vice president of Federated Department Stores: "Let the Consumer Decide," Mar. 11, 1969, Angevine, Box 1, B-2, pp. 6-7.

79. On the economic crisis of this era, see Cross, All-Consuming Century, p. 173; Michael A. Bernstein, "Understanding American Economic Decline: The Contours of the Late-Twentieth-Century Experience," in Bernstein and David E. Adler, eds., Understanding American Economic Decline (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), for an excellent overall analysis, including GNP figures on p. 17, and in the same volume, Jane Knodell, "Financial Institutions and Contemporary Economic Performance," pp. 132-37, on inflation rates; and from NYT: "Excerpts from Reagan TV Address on the Economy," Oct. 25, 1980; "Three Decades of Dwindling Hopes for Prosperity," May 9, 1993; "Feeling Poor in a Rich Economy," Jan. 10, 1995; "That Was Then and This Is the 90's," June 18, 1997.

80. Memorandum from Richard A. Lynch, former executive vice president, New Jersey State AFL-CIO, n.d., cited in Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 68; also see book on deindustrialization more generally.