It was a revolution without Ralph Nader
By Herb Drill
Despite Rudolph Giuliani and some wonderful restaurants and entertainment venues, I DON’T love New York. Still, as a journalist and newspaper “junkies (ink in my veins, don’t you know?), I love two newspapers from New York: The Wall Street Journal (as a financial news writer myself) and The New York Times (also our excellence, despite Jayson Blair).
I’m a subscriber to The Journal (print and Web) and see The Times on the Web. A recent Times article by Emily Eakin gave me a fresh outlook on the Revolution of 1776 and a keener respect for being an American.
She wrote: “In February 1766, taken aback by the violent reaction to the Stamp Act, its latest attempt to impose taxes on the restive American colonies, Britain summoned Benjamin Franklin to Parliament in London. The interview, which lasted several hours, was less than friendly. The Americans, Franklin reminded his interrogators, were voracious consumers of British goods, buying them at a rate that far exceeded the colonies'
staggering population growth. This lucrative spending habit, he warned, should not be taken for granted.”
Franklin warned Parliament that the colonists could either produce necessities themselves or do without. As for "mere articles of fashion," he said, they "will now be detested and rejected."
Lo and behold, a month later the Stamp Act was repealed.
American trade in British goods, valued at more than a million pounds a year - when the pound had big-time value - continued at a galloping pace.
Still, Franklin's words represented a “turning point” in the struggle for independence, maintains T.H. Breen, the William Smith Mason professor of American history at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Americans, he argues, had discovered a political weapon without which the Revolution might not have been successful: consumerism. A long-standing U.S. signature attribute and a trait for which the U.S. is frequently criticized, may have been the foundation of its most inspiring foundational achievement?
Not surprisingly, Ms. Eakin notes, “this is the startling implication of Mr. Breen's new book, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, published recently by Oxford University Press.
In his account, the self-sufficient yeoman farmer of Jeffersonian lore is nowhere to be found. Even before America was a nation, Mr. Breen insists, it was a society of consumers. Deceptively simple, his argument goes like this:
2.5 million strong and scattered along 1,800 miles of coastline, the colonists had little in common besides a weakness for what Samuel Adams derisively termed `the Baubles of Britain.’ When Britain imposed stiff taxes on this appetite for stuff - without granting any political representation - Americans responded with an ingenious invention with instant and widespread appeal: the consumer boycott.”
When the First Continental Congress was convened in September 1774, “transforming mass consumer mobilization into a successful political rebellion was a relatively straightforward task.” As Breen, explains: "Every predictive model that one could have put forward at the time indicated that the colonies, should they beat the British, would have broken into 13 separate entities. Yet somehow enough colonists found enough common cause to make war on what was the strongest military power in the world. How did they create the bond of political trust so that if one city protested or resisted the British, the rest said, `We'll stand with you'? It was this great swelling of consumer experience that was the transformative element."
No, Al Gore, who should have been President, didn’t invent the Internet and consumerism wasn’t invented by Ralph Nader.