"How much does it cost?" We think of this question as one that
preoccupies the nation's shoppers, not its statesmen. But, as
"Pocketbook Politics" dramatically shows, the twentieth-century
American polity in fact developed in response to that very consumer
concern.
In this groundbreaking study, Meg Jacobs demonstrates how
pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political
conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to
Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on
public anger over the high cost of living.
Beginning with the explosion of prices at the turn of the
century, every strike, demonstration, and boycott was, in effect, a
protest against rising prices and inadequate income. On one side, a
reform coalition of ordinary Americans, mass retailers, and
national politicians fought for laws and policies that promoted
militant unionism, government price controls, and a Keynesian
program of full employment. On the other, small businessmen
fiercely resisted this low-price, high-wage agenda that threatened
to bankrupt them.
This book recaptures this dramatic struggle, beginning with the
immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Italian women who flocked to Edward
Filene's famous Boston bargain basement that opened in 1909 and
ending with the Great Inflation of the 1970s.
"Pocketbook Politics" offers a new interpretation of state power
by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Unlike most
social historians who focus exclusively on consumers at the
grass-roots, Jacobs breaks new methodological ground by insisting
on the centrality of national politics and the state in the nearly
century-long fight to fulfill the American Dream of abundance.
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