Readers of Business History Review may think of the middle class as situated, self-consciously if not always altogether reliably, between the wealthy and the working class, but how did these groups become defined, delineated, and defended? Middle Class Union adds significantly to existing scholarship on early-twentieth-century American consumerism, class consciousness, and political activism, demonstrating how white-collar workers, the nation's “Forgotten Folk,” responded to threats to their way of life by claiming to be “the public” the nation had most to honor, protect, and take direction from (p. 2). In the years immediately following World War I, white-collar Americans self-consciously used their consumer practices, consumer status, and consumer identity in a political manner to claim and shore up their place at the center of American life. Middle Class Union, engaging a wide variety of archival sources, government documents, and contemporary newspaper accounts, shifts the conversation about middle-class consumerism from the more-explored setting in the post–World War II era to this earlier period, thereby extending the historiography of class development and class consciousness as well as the ways in which we define political activism.
In the decade preceding the United States’ involvement in World War I, the economy improved for working-class Americans: blue-collar wages rose and working people gained access to the higher-quality consumer goods that had previously served as markers of membership in the middle class, including apparel, food, and housing. Although many middle-class observers had grown up in working-class families, this democratization of consumerism did not correspond well with either their increasing desire for social distinction or the stagnant wages they experienced. As they looked around, these Americans witnessed the rich remaining rich and the working class making strides, but what of their own experiences, aspirations, and self-identity? As Mark Robbins explains, white-collar workers developed a political response, combining nationalist, producerist, and consumerist ideologies to define themselves, allegedly impartially, as the backbone of the nation—and correspondingly, to secure the privileges that would accompany such membership.
This was, Robbins explains, a vexed endeavor. Although white-collar workers wanted to develop distinct middle-class identities, they identified with and relied on many of the values of the working class. They looked down on the labor activism of blue-collar workers but found some working-class labor practices and philosophies helpful if not essential to their cause. They held in disdain some working-class entreaties to the state but expected the government to work aggressively on their behalf. They spoke, repeatedly, of defining and securing a middle-ground position between rapacious capitalists and underperforming laborers, but in doing so more or less abandoned their working-class neighbors, recasting thrift as a value only they embodied. In the immediate aftermath of the war, this cohort was helped by the sentiments and rhetoric of the Red Scare. The “great middle class,” as one newspaper editorial claimed, “neither gouge the people by profiteering, nor clamor for revolution”; instead, by working, attending church, and taking care of family, they had earned the right to “hold the reins of power in the long run” (p. 11). In the coming years, these Americans would find a variety of ways to ensure that what was good for the middle class, economically, came to define what was good for the country.
Robbins explores several of the specific efforts of white-collar workers to move consumers from the periphery to the core of political economy, claiming a hold on traditional working-class values while simultaneously disparaging and displacing actual blue-collar producers. The development of the United States Food Administration (USFA) provides a case in point. As food prices rose during the war, middle-class advocates responded by defining themselves as truly in the middle, as the honest consumers staving off working-class labor agitators and wealthy hoarders and profiteers. The USFA, founded originally to mitigate against rapidly increasing food prices and to conserve food for American troops, became one of the means by which the group secured this middle-class identity. Insufficiently parsing out the difference between incursions of the wealthy and resistance of the working-class, white-collar workers claimed thrift and patriotic consumerism as quintessentially middle-class values and endeavors. Having gained a voice, then used it to claim a consumer space that favored the middle class, volunteers for the USFA fostered policies that were, ultimately, self-referential and, somewhat paradoxically, as much anti-labor as they were pro-consumer.
Middle Class Union describes a range of similar practices among the nation's definition-seeking middle class, with activists addressing such economic injustices as the rising cost of clothing and rents. In each case, the middle class described its inherent commitment to justice, asserted its neutrality, and demanded its rights by claiming a space between the working class and the wealthy, the agitators and the profiteers. In doing so, as Robbins writes, they “portrayed themselves not just as defenders of the public, but as the public” (p. 129).
These efforts decidedly weakened the power of labor unions and paved the way for conservative political and business decisions of the 1920s. Robbins notes, fairly, that the involvement of the middle class in these consumer politics also paved the way for some among their cohort to demand more significant and progressive government interventions in the New Deal era.
Robbins's thoughtful and jargon-free account makes an important contribution to scholarship on American political and class identity and will be of interest to a variety of readers interested in early-twentieth-century American history. Taking a step backward, historically, from the work of Lizabeth Cohen, the work suggests areas that require further exploration than Robbins himself provides, particularly concerning the interrelationships of gender, race, and class. Robbins outlines the efforts of white middle-class women's organizations as they provided volunteers for a variety of these efforts, noting their lack of attention to diversity, but existing scholarship documenting black and white women's gendered and racialized engagements with consumer identity could be drawn on more extensively. Nevertheless, Middle Class Union provides a good read, a careful rendering, and a tantalizing starting point for exploring those and other complications further.
