Consumer Nation

Consumer Nation
By Richard M. Abrams
A BLOOMING INDUSTRY among pundits, journalists, historians, and others celebrates, although more often deplores, America as “a consumer society.” One prize-winning historian has described the country as “A Consumer’s Republic,” suggesting that consumers own the place. Another argues how consumers “shaped” American politics even from the very beginning of the nation in the eighteenth century. Still another argues that it was consumer interests that “fueled liberal politics” from at least the beginning of the twentieth century. [1]
See, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (2003); Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics (2005). Just to mention a few others: Richard Wightman Fox & T.J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption (1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985) ; Lawrence Glickman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (1999).
Not everyone agrees on what is meant by the term. But the elements of the idea include the importance of consumer goods for recreation, for creature comforts, for self-esteem, for social standing, for the country’s prosperity, and in general for Americans’ access to affluence.

But can “consumer society” also accurately describe the American polity? I think not.

To characterize the United States as “a consumer society” at any time in its history misdirects attention from its most important and persistent trait. Whether the economy is fueled by Americans’ avid shopping for consumer goods or by industry’s consumption of capital goods, the focus of the economy and of public policy in America has remained on production. For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a surge of national legislation designed by and for consumer interests. Except for that brief window, American politics has turned almost exclusively on the competition for government favor among rival claims for the rewards of production. For businesses and employers, that meant tax exemptions, depletion allowances, infrastructure development, legal and police restraints on labor agitation and unions, protective tariffs to insure profits, direct subsidies to selected industries, assistance in promoting exports, tort reform, and various other profit-generating incentives. For labor, it meant support for improving wages and working conditions, social insurance, immigration restrictions, protective tariffs to ensure jobs, and collective bargaining rights. For farmers it also meant (different) tariff walls, special access to foreign workers during harvest season, government protection against the spread of agricultural pests and disease, subsidies for crop-improvement research, as well as direct subsidies to boost commodity prices and, indeed, to pad the incomes of certain farmers and agribusinesses.

The Food and Drugs and the Meat Inspection Acts of the Progressive Era might seem to be exceptions. But in fact they are not. When Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, about the meatpacking industry, his focus was on working conditions—the conditions under which the producers labored. And although consumers must have responded as consumers to reports of contaminated meats, what pushed the legislation through was the pressure from Swift, Armour, Cudahy, and other big packers. They needed the government’s imprimatur to overcome the foreign embargoes against their export business that followed from the turn-of-the-century scandals about spoilage, contamination, and adulteration—a problem created mostly by small packers who needed to cut corners to survive in competition with the biggies. The same was true of the Federal Drug Administration, where honest-to-goodness pharmaceutical companies needed to overcome the popularity (among consumers) of the snake-oil hucksters and Lydia Pinkham’s highly successful patent medicine. These were producers’ triumphs, not consumer victories, however much consumers may have benefited as the result of the contest for advantage among competing sectors of an industry.

What about the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? A consumer victory? Not so. U.S. antitrust policy originated primarily in an effort to protect competitors rather than consumers; to stop the “trusts” from “denying the rights of the common man in business,” as one congressman put it in 1900. [2]
The literature on antitrust is voluminous, but on congressional intent regarding protecting competitors, see, for example, Hans Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1955); William Letwin, Congress and the Sherman Antitrust Law, 1887-(University of Chicago Press, 1956). As Olivier Zunz observed in Making America Corporate 1870-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 36, “The fight against bigness was part of a larger goal of maintaining the heterogeneous character of society.”
According to prevailing theory, a competitive multitude among producers not only checked the concentration of power in the country but, equally important, served to build individual character upon which the success of a self-governing people vitally depended. “Only through the participation by the many in the responsibilities and determinations of business,” wrote Justice Louis Brandeis in Liggett v. Lee, an early-twentieth-century antitrust case, “can Americans secure the moral and intellectual development essential to the maintenance of liberty.”

The nation’s political history simply does not support the notion of America as “a consumer society.” For only about the previously mentioned five years or so at the end of the third quarter of the twentieth century were federal and some state laws and regulations passed to protect consumers against flawed and dangerous products. Only then were manufacturers required to inform consumers with some precision just what it was that they would soon put in their house or in their mouth. Only then would producers be required to print on their packages the true ingredients of products and their net weights and to provide information about ingredients such as peanut or sesame oil that could activate fatal allergic reactions in some consumers. Only then did public policy transfer back to producers, at least partially, the external costs of production that for more than a century the society at large had absorbed in the form of ailments and injuries arising from hazardous product ingredients, hazardous working conditions, and polluted soil, air, and water.

It took a series of scandals to bring consumer interests to the attention of American politics. The thalidomide disaster of 1961–1962 called attention to the FDA’s poor servicing of consumers’ interest in safe pharmaceuticals. The work of Ralph Nader early in the sixties projected a spotlight on corporate arrogance by exposing the attempt by General Motors to cover up the flawed design of the company’s subcompact, Corvair, which had a lamentable tendency to flip over when making sharp turns.

BUT THE BRIEF enthusiasm for consumer interests soon dissipated. By 1975, government policies had reverted to their almost exclusive emphasis on producers’ concerns. As the deregulation movement got under way, new transgressions against consumers gained little attention. Ford management memoranda revealed that the company had coldly calculated that to recall its Pinto model, because the gasoline tank was dangerously situated, would be more expensive than to pay off the many victims of incendiary crashes (at an officially estimated cost of $200,000 per human life). There was no recall. The state of Illinois lost a criminal case against the company because it was determined that the government’s “risk/benefit” formula, designed to encourage “economic efficiency,” protected producers from liability when the cost of minimizing the risks to human safety exceeded the anticipated social benefits.

Congress and the American people continued to make clear their overwhelming preference for producer interests over consumer interests. Early in the decade, the government permitted the railroad companies to cut passenger service, thereby making it more difficult for people to travel and helping to clog the highways with automobiles. Even today, many states require passenger trains to yield the right of way to freight trains, further discouraging rail travel by greatly lengthening intercity trips.

In 1977, Congress defeated a measure to require used-car dealers to reveal to customers what might be wrong with the heaps they were hawking. The nation’s representatives followed that up by rejecting proposals to elevate a Consumer Protection Administration to cabinet level, alongside the producer-promoting departments of Agriculture, Labor, and Commerce.

In the 1980s, despite a decades-long-delayed court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission had to permit consumer interests to present their views to the commission at hearings on the distribution of radio and television frequencies, the FCC, with the tacit approval of Congress, persisted in giving its attention solely to producer groups. Only industry members continued to have meaningful access to the FCC, to the exclusion of consumers’ concerns for quality, educational, or public interest programming. [3]
See, Amy Lynn Toro, “Standing Up for Listeners’ Rights: A History of Public Participation at the Federal Communications Commission” (University of California-Berkeley doctoral dissertation, 2000).
At the same time, the public’s interest in access to political information took a backseat to the media corporations’ “free speech” rights, when the courts ruled that the FCC could not require radio and television stations—increasingly controlled by a dwindling handful of megacorporate managers—to permit rebuttals to editorials and programs that promoted particular political, social, or religious causes. Consumers’ interest in a balanced, authoritative presentation of information—the crucial ingredient of “rational choice” in a market-oriented polity—was the distinct loser.

Producer lobbying—and that includes farmers, union workers, processors, and manufacturers—continued to frustrate the efforts of consumer groups and even foreign governments to require U.S. food marketers to properly label goods that contained ingredients that had undergone hormone or gene-altering treatment. There may be nothing wrong with the use of hormones or with gene-engineering for foods, but one might believe that consumers should have the right to know about them. Nor were efforts successful to require producers and distributors of many fresh food products to specify the country or state of origin.

With the advent of George W. Bush’s presidency, the reactionary drift became a landslide. Consumer interests were deliberately excluded from policymaking, whether in the shaping of energy policy, conserving open space, wetlands, and wilderness areas, controlling climate-changing and toxic industrial and vehicular emissions, or restraining monopoly power among producer firms, especially in the media, energy, and financial sectors. Pro-producer measures during the administration of George the Second would reach what many people once considered to be unimaginable levels. In 2005, for example, the agriculture department prohibited cattle ranchers from testing their own animals for Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease, because such testing might give consumers information that could injure the industry. The FDA refused to require pharmaceutical companies to make public the outcome of their own tests on their old and new products, although some of those secret tests turned up dangerous side effects. Inevitably, there arose scandals of cover-ups once individual tragedies came to light. [4]
See, Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It; also, Marcia Angell, “Your Dangerous Drugstore,” New York Review of Books, 8 June 06. Angell is the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 2006, government agencies withheld information for several days about an E. coli outbreak traceable to domestic spinach on the grounds that such information might “panic” consumers and injure producers. Consumers’ access to information that could affect their health was blocked because of producers’ higher interests.

In 2003, Bush proposed eliminating or reducing to insignificance the income tax as the main source of government revenues, substituting instead a tax on consumption. The country had long been gravitating toward a revenue system that relied heavily on sales and excise taxes, and most particularly on user fees (tuition, tolls, licenses, permits, admission fees for museums, public gardens, and zoos, as well as parking fees at hiking trailheads, park picnic sites, and metro stations), all burdens imposed directly on consumers.

Then there are the judicial decisions that make it impossible to impose significant penalties on producers even after they are found guilty of having lied over decades about the dangers of their products. In August 2006, a federal judge ruled that the cigarette companies charged with violating racketeering laws had systematically deceived the public for five decades about the dangers of tobacco. The companies’ executives knew all that time that the products that they aggressively sold to the public had toxic and potentially fatal ingredients, while they publicly lied (at one time, under oath before a congressional committee) about the safety of their products. But, the judge said, she did not have the authority to order significant financial remedies. Why? Because an industry-friendly appellate court had ruled earlier that sanctions against the law violators must be “forward looking,” meaning the courts could not impose substantial fines for past crimes but essentially could only order a change in the industry’s future behavior. The Wall Street Journal remarked, “For most companies a finding from a federal judge that they were racketeers would be a stinging blow,” but “their efforts to hide the risks of smoking are well known,” and so there was no reason to expect that their already tarnished image would suffer any further. The ruling produced an immediate surge in the price of tobacco company securities. A producer-friendly appellate court earlier had also ruled that the government could not seek to recover from the industry the public’s costs in treating Americans whose health suffered from the fraud perpetrated over the decades by the companies.

BUT THE PRIORITY of producer over consumer interests should not require revelations from the media. It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and bodies to be comforted. Contemplate the design of most airplanes and airports and explain how high consumer/user interests rank in the society’s priorities. Enter an airport and sit, sometimes for hours, with a thousand other consumers of airline services in a stifling waiting room with a twelve-foot ceiling; or wedge yourself into a fifteen-by-eighteen-inch seat, where your neighbor’s backrest protrudes within a foot of your chest; or stand anxiously by one of the four or five toilets provided onboard to serve four hundred passengers and try to imagine how lucky you are to live in “a consumer society.” Nor do the rules seem consumer-friendly that allow overbooked airlines to bump passengers waiting to board; or to deny a passenger the right to switch to another airline without further charges when various troubles on the booked airline lead to many hours of delay, and sometimes cause cancellation too late for a passenger to find a reasonable alternative mode of travel—to say nothing of the costs of missing a connecting flight.

How consumer friendly are those gas stations (once called service stations) that require consumers to pump their own gas or else pay an outsize premium per gallon? And can there be more frustrating moments in a working day than fighting with an electronic “pay station” in parking garages and lots that employ no attendants at all (“cost savings”) and where the often balky machine must produce an entry ticket; and then later process the parking slip to permit exiting?

How are consumer interests served when personal telephone records are legally available for a price and for sale at a profit? (Locatecell.com is only one corporation that legally mines and then sells such information to any business or government agency that cares to pay for it.) Consumers of cell-phone services come last when producers see profit opportunities. The same applies to the records kept by department stores, brokerage houses, banks, and insurance companies whose “privacy” notices explain how their clientele have in fact no privacy rights whatever. (Read the fine print.) Nor are personal medical records exempted from the profiteering work of data miners. (Try the Medical Information Bureau.)

How well are consumer interests served when the law allows pushers of products to intrude at will upon our telephones, Internet, and fax machines? Or to pop ads onto television screens, more or less continuously, during an ongoing drama, sitcom, or sports program; or onto a computer screen, sometimes freezing a word-processing session? Can one rent a DVD anymore without having to endure multiple ads for other films before being permitted to see the film rented? To say nothing of the fifteen or twenty minutes of both film and product advertising forced on moviegoers before the film they have paid for appears on the screen. Even national public radio and television stations, partly supported by consumer subscriptions, now present several minutes of ads each hour, necessitated by cuts in congressional support. More than eighty years ago, that old radical Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce when radio was new, declared. “It is unconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising.” [5]
Reprinted in his Memoirs (Macmillan, 1952), p. 140.
How quaint!

Consumers are themselves to blame, seeing themselves first as producers rather than consumers. If there are many who would complain, the media—which are dependent on producers’ ads—are not likely to give them much time or space. But who’s complaining?

If America has become truly “a consumer society,” its politics and policies hardly reflect it. It would be much more accurate to speak of “consumerism” as a producer’s target; or even as a producer’s invention. Of course, “All producers are also consumers; and probably most consumers are also producers.” But it is the capacity in which people conceive of themselves that drives policy. And if it is at all possible to infer that public policy reflects public desires, then we must deduce that for all the centrality of consumer goods for the maintenance of a prosperous economy, for bolstering self-respect, for satisfying recreational desires, and for making claims to social standing, Americans still think of themselves first and above all as producers rather than as consumers.


Richard M. Abrams is a professor of the Graduate School in the Department of History at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941-2001 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
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FOOTNOTES:

* [1] See, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (2003); Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics (2005). Just to mention a few others: Richard Wightman Fox & T.J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption (1983); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1985) ; Lawrence Glickman, ed., Consumer Society in American History (1999).
* [2] The literature on antitrust is voluminous, but on congressional intent regarding protecting competitors, see, for example, Hans Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1955); William Letwin, Congress and the Sherman Antitrust Law, 1887-(University of Chicago Press, 1956). As Olivier Zunz observed in Making America Corporate 1870-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 36, “The fight against bigness was part of a larger goal of maintaining the heterogeneous character of society.”
* [3] See, Amy Lynn Toro, “Standing Up for Listeners’ Rights: A History of Public Participation at the Federal Communications Commission” (University of California-Berkeley doctoral dissertation, 2000).
* [4] See, Marcia Angell, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It; also, Marcia Angell, “Your Dangerous Drugstore,” New York Review of Books, 8 June 06. Angell is the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
* [5] Reprinted in his Memoirs (Macmillan, 1952), p. 140.

Copyright: Dissent