| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. By Meg Jacobs. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. xiv, 349 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-691-08664-8.)
Meg Jacobs puts purchasing power—the ability of consumers to afford goods, the arguments by economists over its importance to a healthy economy, policy makers' debates over how to maximize it, and the alliances and conflicts among consumers, labor, and business over who should determine prices, wages, and profits—at the center of her reinterpretation of American politics from World War I to the 1960s.	1
Policy developments that elsewhere appear disconnected achieve coherence in Jacobs's account. In World War I, Herbert Hoover's Food Administration responded to skyrocketing inflation by publishing wholesale prices and distributing official "fair price" lists to consumers. In the 1920s and 1930s, left-leaning policy experts including Leon Keyserling, Gardiner Means, Rexford Tugwell, and Leon Henderson articulated plans to redistribute wealth by pairing wage increases with stable prices and thus cutting into businessmen's profits. During the 1930s labor and consumers together blamed selfish businessmen for low wages and unjustified prices. Powered by this critique, New Dealers pushed through a purchasing-power agenda that attacked monopoly pricing through the National Industrial Recovery Act, guaranteed a minimum wage through the Fair Labor Standards Act, and protected consumers from shoddy goods with the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.	. . .

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