Middle Class Union

In the wake of World War I, pinched between stagnating incomes and rising prices, white-collar (and largely white) Americans organized politically as “the middle class” to combat the rising cost of living and to demand government action. Claiming their own economic interests as the embodiment of “the public,” they lashed out at the twin villains they held responsible for their plight: elite profiteers and greedy workers. Mark W. Robbins's Middle Class Union traces the rise and decline of this unprecedented attempt by self-consciously middle-class consumers “to protect their pocketbooks and assert their vision of a just economy” (p. 5). To combat skyrocketing postwar food, clothing, and rent costs, white-collar Americans established home garden committees and municipal markets, volunteered on fair price committees and formed “wear overalls clubs,” created middle-class tenant associations, and even tried to organize “a ‘middle class union’ to unite all middle-class consumer organizing movements” (ibid.). Robbins's chapter on the “overalls movement,” in which white-collar workers dressed in traditional working-class garb to protest clothing costs and “the working-class's supposed role in causing high prices,” is a highlight of the book (p. 96). From its beginnings in March 1920 as a club in Jacksonville, Florida, the overalls movement exploded into a national phenomenon that featured prominently in the nation's popular culture and politics, from town councils to the halls of Congress. This chapter highlights Robbins's attentiveness to the class, racial, and gender dimensions of white-collar protests and his skillful interweaving of the national with local case studies. (The following chapter, on Chicago tenant organizing, might have benefitted from a similar level of attention to the national stage

Clothing · Collar · Economic history · Economics · Elite · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation · Working class · World War II · American History and Culture · Finance · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society