"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.
