Rorotoko

In a nutshell

Buying Power traces the origins and development of consumer activism in America from the 1760s to the present. Historians and other scholars have written about discrete boycotts or closely conjoined sets of boycotts (such as those of the 1760s and 1770s). My book, by contrast, treats consumer activism as a continuous and significant American political tradition.

To say that boycotts constitute a political tradition is not to claim that that tradition was monolithic. From the beginning, boycotts were deployed by groups with very different political agendas. Two chapters early in my book, for example, contrast antebellum America’s abolitionist boycotters of slave-made goods and white Southern proponents of “non intercourse” with the North. These groups employed nearly-identical tactics to promote antithetical goals, putting their shared belief in the power of organized consumption to work for opposing causes.

One advantage of studying consumer activism from a long-term perspective, then, is that this vantage reveals that recent conservative boycotts (such as the Southern Baptist boycott of the Disney corporation) are not departures from a monolithic “progressive” tradition.

Another advantage of studying consumer activism from a long-term perspective is that it makes salient both the continuities and transformations within this more than two-century tradition, setting into relief aspects of consumer politics that developed and changed over time.

It was not until the twentieth century that consumer politics came to be characterized by a conception of “the consumer” as needing protection. Moreover, it was in this period that there emerged self-described consumer organizations, groups that saw their task as representing, defending and lobbying for consumers themselves. These groups established consumers as one interest group among many in a pluralistic society—rather than as an embodiment of that society, as consumers had been thought of by most nineteenth century consumer activists.

These groups coalesced in the 1930s into something known as the “consumer movement,” an organized political effort on behalf of consumers, whose chief aim was, as Helen Sorenson described it in her 1941 book, The Consumer Movement, “protecting and promoting the consumer interest.” The federal government itself came to understand the protection of the consumer interest as one of its duties, starting with the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, through the various consumer advisory boards of the New Deal, and through the President’s Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs, begun under President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.

What distinguished the “consumer movement” from previous and contemporaneous movements of consumers was precisely this emphasis on consumers themselves as the chief beneficiaries of political activism. By contrast, neither Revolutionary boycotters, “free produce” campaigners, nor even the turn-of-the-twentieth-century founders of the National Consumers’ League saw themselves as part of a “consumer movement.” Rather, these groups mobilized consumers not for the benefit of consumers but on behalf of the nation, the slave, the worker, or the poor.

The wide angle

Long distance solidarity is perhaps the key concept I explore in this book. Consumer activists were among the first Americans to declare that moral agency should not be dictated by geography. They did so not for abstract reasons (about human brotherhood, for example) or because they necessarily held that every person on earth was equally worthy. The claim for the importance of long distance solidarity was far more concrete. Consumer activists argued that consumers’ actions had a direct impact on the people who made and sold the goods they bought. Consumers in the aggregate held tremendous power over these people and thus had a concomitant responsibility to exercise this power in an ethical fashion.

In making this claim about consumer power and responsibility, consumer activists consistently challenged contemporary standards of moral responsibility: not, as did most critics, because those standards set the bar too high, but because they set it too low.

Humanitarianism in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and philanthropy in the twentieth and twenty-first have urged individuals to feel sympathy for, and to alleviate the suffering of, others, typically through charitable donations. But they have not held the individuals whose donations and support they seek responsible for that suffering. By contrast, consumer activists, from the late eighteenth century onward, posited a networked world (hence their favored metaphors of the web and the chain), in which there existed no guilt-free observers. If humanitarians and philanthropists urged Good Samaritans to step in after the suffering for which they bore no responsibility, consumer activists held shoppers liable for the suffering.

Consumer choices, in their view, were inevitably moral choices as well. Consumer activists proclaimed the “death of moral distance,” long before recent debates about the need to “think globally.” No matter how far away physically, victims of deleterious consuming practices were not unrelated to consumers in a moral sense. Consumer activists, in effect, proposed a new physics of time and space, highlighting the real-time effects of consumption and suggesting that in an increasingly networked economy, the moral impact of one’s actions was not determined by physical propinquity but by the market-based effects of one’s economic actions.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the logic of consumer activism held that consumption might and probably did influence the morality of one’s relationships with the distant and unknown workers who produced the goods one bought—as well as with their employers, environment, and countries.

Consumer activists proclaimed the “death of moral distance,” long before recent debates about the need to “think globally.”