A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society.

A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. By Lawrence B. Glickman (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1997. xvi plus 220pp.).

Consumerism has become a hot topic both for labor and cultural historians. In part, that interest probably reflects maturing of the 60s academic cohort, intellectually shedding some of their countercultural hostilities to the concerns of mainstream culture. In part, it probably reflects the prevailing anti-utopianism following the collapse of communism and much of the rest of the traditional left. Lawrence Glickman's lively and thoughtful intellectual history of the concept of a living wage speaks both to historians of American working people and to historians of American culture, and reflects the current mood. Whether readers will find themselves agreeing or disagreeing with the author will probably have less to do with the rigor of Glickman's presentation than with their own feelings about contemporary trends.

Glickman builds his argument in four steps (summarized on p. xiv). First, he argues that development of the "notion of the living wage" allowed working people to intellectually resolve the contradiction between wage labor and such components of republican ideology as independence and freedom. They could now see a living wage nor as "wage slavery" but as "constitutive of freedom by redefining wages in consumerist terms." This process, he demonstrates, began much earlier than has often been supposed, shortly after the Civil War rather than in the twentieth century. Second, this consumerist turn in working-class thought was not a product of bourgeois hegemony. "Workers played an active role in the construction of American consumer society ... as originators of a vision of a democratic political economy...." Third, working people recognized the market "as a human construction" which they could "shape ... for their own benefit" by their struggles. Fourth, "the living wage expresses the transformation of nineteenth-century republican into twentieth-century industrial America ... setting the stage for the consumerist common ground of the New Deal order."

Glickman's primary method is discourse analysis, and he does it very well. He traces the evolution and nuances of such terms as "wage slavery," "prostitution," "producerism," "living wage," "American standard of living," and "consumer". He writes clearly and evocatively, with sensitivity to gender and race as well as class. However, discourse analysis lends itself better to some of his four points than others. Thus, for example, his case for how the living wage concept facilitated intellectual resolution of contradictions between wage labor and republicanism seems more convincing to me than his case for working-class self-construction of consumerism. Proving the latter probably needs more attention to how social relations and power shape the development of ideas, and more concrete examination of workers' consumerist struggles, something Glickman refers to but does not describe in detail.

But, in the end, my reaction to this book probably has less to do with the author's methodology than my feelings about political and popular culture at the millenium. Glickman's study is intended, I think, as a brief against despair. Consumerism now reigns triumphant, and Glickman seems to be saying not to worry. Consumerism's triumph is really a democratic triumph; consumerism wins because the people want it. By shaping the ideology to meet their needs, they use it to empower themselves. I'm still too much of an unreconstructed 60s utopian to buy that. Yes, I now own a house (along with the bank), a car, and a dizzying array of consumer durables. But paying for this stuff seems more like a weight around my neck than a source of liberation. I suspect many working people would agree with me.