In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
American Quarterly 51.3 (1999) 709-717
Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in
the Twentieth Century. By Robert E. Weems. New York: New York
University Press, 1998. x + 195 pages.
18.95
(paper).
A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer
Society. By Lawrence B. Glickman. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997. x + 220 pages.
15.95 (paper).
We have got to bring the cat out of hiding,
and where he is hiding is in the bank.
--James Baldwin
In the fall of 1963, James Baldwin, as a member of "Actors and
Writers for Social Justice," urged African Americans to join in a
boycott of consumer goods to take place during the Christmas
shopping season. The purpose of the boycott was to demonstrate
African American outrage over the bombing murders of four black
girls in a Birmingham Sunday School class in September of 1963. In
a speech promoting the boycott, Baldwin used the "hep" metaphor
above to suggest that a Christmas boycott would attack the
bottom-line of white corporate America, thus rousting the "cat" of
racist hypocrisy from its hiding place in capital.
The Christmas boycott, if it had gone forward, might have been
very powerful indeed: ten days after the bombing, a national poll
of African Americans found that 89 percent would be willing to join
in a boycott if it they were asked to participate by a "prominent
Negro." But the Christmas boycott, in the face of opposition by
other civil rights leaders, did not go forward. On the other hand,
as Robert Weems argues in Desegregating the Dollar, even the
threat of such a boycott was taken seriously by white
business leaders. So seriously, in fact, that white business
leaders helped to ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 -- an act which included specific provisions relating to
consumer rights (67-68).
I am drawn to Baldwin's metaphor of the "cat in the bank"
because it reminds us that working and marginal American can use
their collective power as consumers to fight for political,
economic, and social justice. Although over the last decade in
American studies we have gained essential knowledge about how
working and marginal peoples have consumed mass culture --
everything from burlesque halls, vaudeville, Coney Island,
Munsey's, and dime novels, to film noir, Harlequin Romances, I
Love Lucy, and rap -- few of us, in our role as cultural
historians have investigated the ways in which working-class and
marginal Americans have consumed their daily bread, articulated
their identity as consumers, and used their power as consumers to
change their lives.
Lawrence Glickman, with A Living Wage, and Robert Weems,
with Desegregating the Dollar, go a long ways towards
turning social and cultural history towards a consumer culture that
goes beyond the realm of "leisure." We can add their path-breaking
studies to our small but growing shelf of cultural histories which
look at consumer culture from the point of view of organized
workers, women, and African Americans, such as Liz Cohen's
Making the New Deal, Robin Kelley's Race Rebels, and
Dana Frank's Purchasing Power. Like these scholars, Glickman
and Weems do not equate consumer culture with passive audiences and
de-politicized alienation. Rather, they are both interested in the
potential for consumer culture to serve as a base for political,
social and economic change. Moreover, they demonstrate that the
realms of consumption and production are dialectically bound. And,
finally, their work reflects a unique blend of labor history,
consumer history, and cultural studies.
A Living Wage offers an innovative, challenging, and
unorthodox consumerist approach to labor history after the Civil
War. Painstakingly, Glickman traces the emergence and the evolution
of the phrase "living wage," in labor speeches, the labor press,
main-stream newspapers, magazines, pulp-fiction, pamphlets, and
legal documents of turn-of-the-century America. Glickman argues
that working Americans, especially working-class white men, did not
take the transition to wage labor lying down. Instead, he argues,
workers contrasted the idea of "wage slavery" with the more
liberating notion of a "living wage," using a discourse which
reflected a consumerist class-consciousness.
In Parts I and II...