The Strike in the Temple of
Consumption: Consumer Activism and Twentieth-Century American Political Culture

Lawrence B. Glickman

In September 1935 forty-one employees of a small firm in rural New Jersey walked off the job to establish a picket line. In a year of more than two thousand strikes involving well over one million workers, neither the size of the strike nor its proximate cause—management's refusal to recognize a duly elected union—stood out. Yet it was "one of the strangest strikes in American history," as a participant declared many years later. In its six-month duration, during a year of notable labor upheavals, this small strike became one of the most talked-about. Reinhold Niebuhr chaired a committee of luminaries that investigated the strike, one of the first adjudicated by the newly created National Labor Relations Board.1	1
The strike received so much attention because it occurred at Consumers' Research (CR), a product-testing and consumer-education organization with more than fifty thousand subscribers. Not only was the CR strike a classic example of the "unrest in odd places" manifested in the era's labor actions, it also pointed to a schism in the movement that many Americans had come to believe was their salvation. Before the strike, CR was, in the words of Business Week, "the fair-haired boy of liberalism," the vanguard of a rapidly expanding consumer movement that was seen as central to the movement culture of the depression decade. Thus, what the trade journal Sales Management dubbed "the strike in the temple of consumption" set off shock waves because it challenged assumptions about the nature of the consumer movement, revealed a split in it, and raised doubts about the strength of the supposedly powerful alliance between liberals and radicals. "A Strike at Consumers' Research . . . is no ordinary strike. Here is an organization that has appealed to a liberal, if not a radical, public constituency," noted Advance, a liberal religious magazine, expressing the consensus shared by advocates and opponents of the consumer movement. Just as the consumer movement was becoming recognized as a powerful force, the strike revealed its fractures; just when the Popular Front appeared to be coalescing, the CR strike showed it turning on itself.2	2
If the strike at CR called into question the solidarity of the consumer movement, it also showed that, confident pronouncements notwithstanding, there was confusion about who exactly was a "consumer." For a society that had only recently "discovered" the consumer—labeled by one commentator as "the most popular, most sought after, the most flirted with debutante of 1934"—the realization that, as two well-known consumer activists put it, "the consumer remains a shy and elusive being" made impossible any simple definition of the "consumer interest." "Even where the existence of the consumer is admitted," Walton H. Hamilton, the director of the short-lived Consumers Division of the National Recovery Administration, lamented, "it is charged that his interest cannot be reduced to a get-at-able question." After the CR strike, one could no longer describe the consumer movement or its constituency—American consumers—in monolithic terms.3	. . .