Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization

1 The Fear of Fortune

1 The Fear of Fortune The Uneasy Consumer in an Age of Affluence In 1956, Colston E. Warne, a professor of economics at Amherst College, Massachusetts, sought to spread the gospel of consumerism throughout the Western, capitalist world. Warne had been president of the U.S. comparative testing organization, Consumers Union since its establishment in 1936. After completing his dissertation on the U.S. co-operative movement at the University of Chicago, he had gone on to campaign for workers’ rights and civil liberties and became associated with the “people’s lobby” of the socialist Benjamin Marsh. At Consumers Union, he had overseen its struggles with difficult financial issues and internal personality clashes, he had helped it overcome the acrimony from its rivals at Consumers’ Research (CR), from which it had split twenty years earlier, and he had helped fend off charges of communism leveled against it several times by the House Un-American Activities Committee.1 Although Consumers Union remained a relatively small organization immediately after World War II, as the European economies gradually shifted from austerity to affluence it proved an inspiration to many thousands of middle-class consumers who embraced the new world of goods yet faced with trepidation the challenges confronting them in a more complex and technological marketplace. Recognizing the growing interest in comparative testing as a means of assisting consumers in making informed choices, Consumers Union took a special interest in European developments and Warne in particular was eager to foster a nascent movement. As early as 1939, he had explored the possibility of developing comparative testing agencies within the European consumer co-operatives and had identified interest in the work of Consumers Union (CU) by bodies such as the Swedish Home Economics group. Soon after World War II, a steady stream of letters reached him at the offices of CU from enterprising European subscribers to Consumer Reports, requesting advice on launching parallel organizations and magazines.2 Consumers Union provided what materials it could to assist fledgling initiatives such as the Union Fédérale des Consommateurs , established in France in 1951 by the Parisian civil servant André Romieu.3 Warne assumed responsibility at CU for collating these contacts and he was able to report to the United Nations in January 1956 of interest in organized consumerism in around twenty countries from Iceland to Israel as well as further afield in Pakistan, India, and South Africa.4 Of particular significance was a letter of 9 November 1955 from Dorothy and Ray Goodman, two American graduate students at the London School of Economics, who were eager to create an organization modeled on CU in Great Britain. They prepared a dummy magazine, obtained the support of a number of prominent public figures , including the “social entrepreneur” Michael Young, who would assume the initiative once they returned to the United States, and helped launch the UK Consumers’ Association in 1956, which began publishing its own testing magazine Which? the following year.5 The initial assistance provided by Warne and CU was crucial to its success. Encouraged by such initiatives, Warne decided to visit Europe in the summer of 1956. Beginning with the Goodmans in London, he toured several countries where consumer organizing had already taken place, such as Belgium, Austria, West Germany, and the Netherlands, and sought out further contacts with government officials and concerned citizens interested in providing independent information about products to consumers. It marked the start of the realization of Warne’s international vision for organized consumerism, which would later see him travel around most of the Asia-Pacific region and which would result in the creation of a genuinely global consumer movement. But for the 1950s at least, his trip highlighted a growing concern among consumers that in the transition to affluence not all was to be welcomed. As Europeans were given more choice and enjoyed ever higher incomes to make such choices, there were nevertheless fears to be confronted in the new era of fortune. For however much economic reconstruction was being implemented in the name of the consumer , consumers themselves felt alone and overwhelmed in the modern market . Independent tests of branded commodities therefore offered a means by which the power of the advertiser, the retailer, the manufacturer, and the scientist could be matched by the power of the no longer sovereign consumer. Warne’s consumerist mission of 1956 therefore followed in the wake of so many productivity missions that had crossed the Atlantic in the decade following the end of...