The Cat in the Bank: Consumption and Production in Cultural History

We have got to bring the cat out of hiding, and where he is hiding is in the bank.

—James Baldwin

In the fall of 1963, James Baldwin, as a member of “Actors and Writers for Social Justice,” urged African Americans to join in a boycott of consumer goods to take place during the Christmas shopping season. The purpose of the boycott was to demonstrate African American outrage over the bombing murders of four black girls in a Birmingham Sunday School class in September of 1963. In a speech promoting the boycott, Baldwin used the “hep” metaphor above to suggest that a Christmas boycott would attack the bottom-line of white corporate America, thus rousting the “cat” of racist hypocrisy from its hiding place in capital.

The Christmas boycott, if it had gone forward, might have been very powerful indeed: ten days after the bombing, a national poll of African Americans found that 89 percent would be willing to join in a boycott if it they were asked to participate by a “prominent Negro.” But the Christmas boycott, in the face of opposition by other civil rights leaders, did not go forward. On the other hand, as Robert Weems argues in Desegregating the Dollar, even the threat of such a boycott was taken seriously by white business leaders. So seriously, in fact, that white business leaders helped to ensure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—an act which included specific provisions relating to consumer rights (67–68).

I am drawn to Baldwin’s metaphor of the “cat in the bank” because it reminds us that working and marginal American can use their collective power as consumers to fight for political, economic, and social justice. Although over the last decade in American studies we have gained essential knowledge about how working and marginal peoples have consumed mass culture—everything from burlesque halls, vaudeville, Coney Island, Munsey’s, and dime novels, to film noir, Harlequin Romances, I Love Lucy, and rap—few of us, in our role as cultural historians have investigated the ways in which working-class and marginal Americans have consumed their daily bread, articulated their identity as consumers, and used their power as consumers to change their lives.

Lawrence Glickman, with A Living Wage, and Robert Weems, with Desegregating the Dollar, go a long ways towards turning social and cultural history towards a consumer culture that goes beyond the realm of “leisure.” We can add their path-breaking studies to our small but growing shelf of cultural histories which look at consumer culture from the point of view of organized workers, women, and African Americans, such as Liz Cohen’s Making the New Deal, Robin Kelley’s Race Rebels, and Dana Frank’s Purchasing Power. ¹ Like these scholars, Glickman and Weems do not equate consumer culture with passive audiences and de-politicized alienation. Rather, they are both interested in the potential for consumer culture to serve as a base for political, social and economic change. Moreover, they demonstrate that the realms of consumption and production are dialectically bound. And, finally, their work reflects a unique blend of labor history, consumer history, and cultural studies.

A Living Wage offers an innovative, challenging, and unorthodox consumerist approach to labor history after the Civil War. Painstakingly, Glickman traces the emergence and the evolution of the phrase “living wage,” in labor speeches, the labor press, main-stream newspapers, magazines, pulp-fiction, pamphlets, and legal documents of turn-of-the-century America. Glickman argues that working Americans, especially working-class white men, did not take the transition to wage labor lying down. Instead, he argues, workers contrasted the idea of “wage slavery” with the more liberating notion of a “living...