Many colleagues and friends made helpful suggestions that influenced this article. I would especially like to thank Ken Clements, Jill Frank, Daniel Horowitz, Susan Levine, Michael O'Malley, and David Roediger. A University of South Carolina Research and Productive Scholarship Grant freed up time for travel and writing. Some material is reproduced from Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

1. “A Sketch of Political Economy, Chapter VIII. Consumption,” Journal of United Labor, 12 25, 1884, 865–67; quotation 865.Google Scholar

2. Kazin, Michael, “The Workers' Party?,” New York Times, 10 19, 1995. A25.Google Scholar See also Kazin, Michael, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York, 1995), 76, 143, 145.Google Scholar

3. For an argument that the new consumer history can provide the groundwork for a new synthesis, see Lawrence Glickman, “Born to Shop? Consumption as a Basis for Synthesis in U.S. History,” paper presented at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting. Chicago, 1996.Google Scholar

4. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson, “Introduction,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T.J. Jackson (New York, 1983), xi.Google ScholarClarke, John notes that Fox and Lears' book leaves a “central relationship—that of waged work and consumption … untouched.” New Times and Old Enemies: Essays on Cultural Studies and America (London, 1991), 94.Google Scholar

5. See, for example, Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986);Google ScholarBenson, Susan Porter, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, 1986);Google ScholarRosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York, 1983);Google ScholarCohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990);Google ScholarCouvares, Francis G., The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Pittsburgh, 1984);Google ScholarSanchez, George J., Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

6. Horowitz, Daniel calls for a “reciprocal model … that emphasizes the power of the economic system and elites to set the frame work of consumer culture but does not forget the ability of people, within limits, to shape the meaning of their consumption patterns.” The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore, 1985), 168.Google Scholar

7. Clarke, John, “Pessimism versus Populism: The Problematic Politics of Popular Culture,” in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, ed. Butsch, Richard (Philadelphia, 1990), 28–44.Google Scholar

8. Fraser, Steve, “The ‘Labor Question,’” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (Princeton, 1989), 57.Google Scholar In the postwar years, Nelson Lichtenstein similarly writes, “the labor movement began to substitute the language of technical Keynsianism— “purchasing power,’ ‘aggregate demand,’ ‘wage-price stability’—for much of the prewar lexicon of power, justice and industrial democracy.” Lichtenstein, , The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995), 221.Google Scholar

9. “It is extremely difficult to know just where workers' orientation to moral capitalism came from,” writes Cohen. She speculates that “longstanding expectations about America. particularly workers' own desire to acquire property,” played a role, as did the largely failed example of 1920s-style welfare capitalism. But the ideas of Steward and other proponents of labor's “consumerist turn” mark a more direct antecedent. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 315. Jean-Christophe Agnew has suggested that “the pervasive promise of American consumerism inspired the labour militance of the 1930s and after,” but also says little about the nineteenthcentury roots of consumerist labor militance;Google Scholar“Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Brewer, John and Porter, Roy (New York, 1993), 19–39; quotation 31.Google ScholarFrank, Dana, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

10. By all accounts Steward was stubborn, irritable, and, like many a product of the New England reform tradition, supremely convinced of his infallibility. Fellow labor radical Edward H. Rogers, a man who shared Steward's worldview, labeled him “injudicious,” “insulting,” and “discourteous.” McNeill's, George poem, “To Ira Steward,” is in his Unfrequented Paths: Songs of Nature, Labor and Men (Boston, 1903), 95–96.Google Scholar Another important collaborator was his first wife, Mary B. Steward, the secretary of the Boston Eight-Hour League, who composed a couplet which became nationally known during the late-nineteenth-century struggle for the shorter workday: “Whether you work by the piece or by the day/Decreasing the hours increases the pay.”

11. Kaufman, Stuart et al. , eds., The Samuel Gompers Papers, Vol. 2: The Early Years of the American Federation of Labor, 1887–1890 (Urbana, 1987), 426.Google Scholar An examination of Steward's influence can be found in Mussey, Henry Raymond, “Eight-Hour Theory in the American Federation of Labor,” in Economic Essays: Contributed in Honor of John Bates Clark, ed. Hollander, Jacob (New York, 1927), 220–43;Google ScholarDorfman, Joseph, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, Vol. 3: 1865–1918 (New York, 1949), 27–28, 47.Google Scholar Steward's ideas attracted a wide range of working-class leaders of varying ideological stripes. As Leon Fink has noted, “In the United States, disillusionment with the older nobility-of-toil ethic was equally evident in Wobbly Big Bill Haywood's admonition, ‘the less work the better’ and in Samuel Gompers' advice that ‘the way out of the wage system is through higher wages.’” Fink could have noted that Gompers' advice was a direct quotation from Steward. Fink, Leon, “Looking Backward: Reflections on Workers' Culture and Certain Conceptual Dilemmas Within Labor History,” in Perspectives on American Labor History, ed. Moody, J. Carroll and Kessler-Harris, Alice (Dekalb, 1989), 5–29;Google Scholar quotation 15. Gompers' full statement was: “in the language of that foremost of economic and social thinkers, Ira Steward, ‘The way out of the wage system is through higher wages, resultant only from shorter hours.” Quoted in Hollitz, John Erwin, “The Challenge of Abundance: Reactions to the Development of a Consumer Economy, 1890–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1981), 69.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, Douglas, Dorothy, “Ira Steward on Consumption and Unemployment,” Journal of Political Economy 40 (08 1932), 532–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. See, for example, Kim Moody, “When High Wage Jobs are Gone, Who Will Buy What We Make?,” Labor Notes (June 1994): 8–9, 13;Google ScholarSchor, Juliet B., The Overworked American (New York, 1992).Google Scholar

14. No biography of Steward has been written. The most complete examination of Steward's life and ideas appears in Montgomery, David, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (Urbana, 1981), esp. 249–60.Google Scholar For a full bibliography, see Glickman, Lawrence, “Ira Steward,” in American National Biography, ed. Garraty, John A. (New York, forthcoming).Google Scholar His famous pamphlets “A Reduction of Hours, an Increase of Wages” and “The Powers of the Cheaper over the Dearer” were published in Commons, John R. et al. ,, A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. 9: 1860–1880, Part 1 (New York, 1958), 284–301 and 306–29. Both of these are chapters in Stewart's uncompleted and unpublished book manuscript, “The Political Economy of Eight Hours” (Ira Steward Papers, Archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison). Citations of this source below include chapter titles and page numbers whenever possible.Google Scholar

15. At the time of his death, Steward was president of both the Boston Eight-Hour League and the National Ten-Hour League. Steward regularly lobbied the Massachusetts legislature and worked with the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics (the first such Bureau in the country, founded in 1869), to promote shorter hour legislation. In 1874, Massachusetts passed the first effective ten-hour law for women and children.Google Scholar

16. Steward stopped working on this book in 1882, the year before he died, but most of it was written during the 1870s.Google Scholar

17. Less persuasively, Montgomery also characterizes Steward's writings as “unsophisticated”; Beyond Equality, 250.Google Scholar

18. See “Costs of Increased Wealth” in Steward, “The Political Economy of Eight Hours.” The first recorded use of the term “living wage” came in England. Hugh Lloyd Jones used the term in “Should Wages Be Regulated by Market Prices?,” The Beehive, July 18, 1874. Steward's manuscript was written between the 1860s and 1882 and, since he did not date this section, it is impossible to know exactly when he first used this term.Google Scholar On the history of the “living wage,” see Glickman, Lawrence, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, 1997).Google Scholar

19. “Economy and Extravagance,” in Steward, “The Political Economy of Eight Hours,” 5. Later in the manuscript he wrote: “It is treason to the idea of Republicanism to use the power of a Republic to make labor cheap. Because the most highly paid labor the world ever saw was necessary, to make Republican government possible. Confidence in the Republic falls, when wages fall.” “The Powers of the Cheaper over the Dearer,” 67.Google Scholar

20. “Economy or Capitalist Interference,” 3, in Ibid.

21. “The Power of Wealth,” 4, in Ibid.

22. Untitled section, 6, in Ibid.

23. Rather than viewing the saloon as the locus of counterhegemonic practices, like many native-born labor reformers he believed the “inebriated or dissipated laborer” to be a detriment to the labor movement. Ibid., 23.

24. Ibid., 23.

25. The fact that Steward “began with pleasure and consumption rather than sacrifice and productivity … was not so surprising” in the “American context”; Roediger, David R. and Foner, Philip S., Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (New York, 1989), 85.Google Scholar

26. Steward's dismissal of some forms of consumer activity combined with his strong support for others recalls the distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” consumption made by political economists from Adam Smith through David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Dobb, Maurice, Theories of Value and Distribution Since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory (London, 1973), 94–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Steward, “The Political Economy of Eight Hours,” 628.Google Scholar On “mutualism,” see Montgomery, David, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York, 1979), 18–27.Google Scholar

28. Indeed, , one of Steward's central chapters in “The Political Economy of Eight Hours” is entitled “Economy and Extravagance.”Google Scholar

29. “Economy and Extravagance,” 6, in Steward, “The Political Economy of Eight Hours.”Google Scholar

30. Steward, “Consumption and Hours of Labor,” 2, in Ibid.

31. “Economy and Extravagance,” 1, in Ibid.

32. Ibid., 2.

33. “Consumption and the Hours of Labor,” in Ibid.

34. “Supply and Demand and Wages,” in Ibid.

35. “Consumption is the end, labor is the means to the end,” noted the newspaper of the Knights of Labor. “A Sketch of Political Economy, Chapter VIII. Consumption,” Journal of United Labor, December 25, 1884, 865. As George McNeill noted in testimony before the Massachusetts Legislature in the 1870s, “The gentlemen who are constantly urging that a reduction in time is a loss of production only look at one side of the problem. To them man is only a producer. We invite you to consider him in his capacity as a consumer. They say, make him produce more. We say, make him consume more.”Google ScholarMcNeill, George E., Argument on the Hours of Labor: Delivered before the Labor Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature (New York, 187?), 7, Baker Business Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.Google Scholar

36. Steward, , “The Political Economy of Eight Hours,” 8.Google Scholar

37. “The laborer is the great employer of labor,” Steward wrote; “The Political Economy of Eight Hours,” 4.Google Scholar

38. He continued: “When laborers increase their consumption of wealth their own employment increases… But when less wealth is consumed employments fall.”Google ScholarIbid.

39. “The Powers of the Cheaper over the Dearer,”Google Scholar in Ibid.

40. The “time has fully arrived, when political economy must begin with the idea that our country is the world, and our countrymen are all mankind.”Google ScholarIbid., 32, 55, 62.

41. Alexander Yard makes a similar point, favorably comparing Steward's views with those of his more explicitly racist contemporaries; Yard, , “Albert Parsons and the Tragedy of Economic Empire,” in Haymarket Scrapbook, ed. Roediger, David and Rosemont, Franklin (Chicago, 1986), 38–39.Google Scholar

42. As a close observer of the labor movement wrote shortly before the turn of the century, “All a priori theories of liberty and brotherhood yield quickly before the actual competition of different standards of living in a common market.” Brooks, John Graham, “The Trade Union Label,” in The Making of America, Vol. 8: Labor, ed. LaFollette, Robert M. (Chicago, 1905), 181.Google Scholar

43. “The Power of the Cheaper over the Dearer,” in Steward, “The Political Economy of Eight Hours,” 65.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., 65. See also Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971); Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca, 1986).

45. Steward, , “The Political Economy of Eight Hours,” 45.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., 643.

47. For an analysis of this phrase, see Glickman, Lawrence, “Inventing the ‘American Standard of Living’: Gender, Race, and Working-Class Identity, 1880–1925,” Labor History 34 (1993), 221–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. “Economy and Extravagance,” 4, in Steward, “The Political Economy of Eight Hours.”Google Scholar

49. “Those who make their own bread discharge bakers. If they raise their own food they discharge farmers. If they make their own shoes, they discharge shoe-makers”; Ibid.

50. “Consumption and Hours of Labor,” 13–14Google Scholar, in Ibid.

51. Ibid., 618.

52. Ibid., 620.

53. “Economy and Extravagance,” 7, in Ibid.

54. “Ira Steward,” Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1883. See also Dr. E.E. Spencer, “‘Ira Steward,’ an Address before the Prospect Union, November 13, 1895,” 6–12. Ira Steward Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library, Madison.Google Scholar

55. Baudrilliard, Jean, The Mirror of Production, translated by Poster, Mark (St. Louis, 1975), 17.Google Scholar

56. In critiquing political economy as “the science of asceticism,” Marx wrote: “the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink, and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc, the more you save … your capital.” Marx, Karl, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Tucker, Robert C. (New York, 1978), 95–96.Google Scholar

57. Gompers, Samuel, “A Minimum Living Wage,” American Federationist, April 1898, 25–30. While acknowledging that “low wages are a curse to a community,” Charles Litchman, a general secretary of the Knights of Labor, declared in 1885 that “good wages mean greater power of consumption. The more consumed the more demanded, the more demanded the more produced.” He continued: “If… wages are reduced to a rate that will purchase only the bare necessities of life, there will be a demand and a market for only the necessities of life.” Charles H. Litchman, “Starvation Wages,” Journal of United Labor, June 1883, 492.Google Scholar

58. See Wood, Daniel B., “Debate Escalates Over ‘Living Wage’ as an Antipoverty Tool,” Christian Science Monitor, October 17, 1996.Google Scholar

59. “What This Label Means: An Organized Demand”; Milwaukee Trades Union League, “End of the Century Labor Day Souvenir,” 1900; both in Collection of Materials Regarding Union Labels, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Library, Madison.Google Scholar

60. Steward, , “The Political Economy of Eight Hours,” 64.Google Scholar

61. Milwaukee, Trades Union League, “End of the Century Labor Day Souvenir.” As a union journal noted: “if all wage earners could be persuaded to concentrate their purchasing power on behalf of union label products… the cause of organized labor would be materially advanced.” “Support Union Labels,” The Shoe Workers' Journal, December 1916, 8–9.Google Scholar

62. Hoage, Earl R., “Employ Union Labor With Your Own Money,” The Woman's Union Label League Journal, October 1916.Google Scholar

63. Macarthur, Walter, “First Prize Essay—Union Label Prize Essays,” American Federationist, July 1904, 573–75; quotation 574.Google Scholar

64. Hoage, , “Employ Union Labor with Your Own Money.”Google Scholar

65. Hunter, Robert, “Unionism and Union Labels,” The Shoe Workers' Journal, April 1916, 3–4.Google Scholar

66. “Trade Unionists of Philadelphia,” The Vindicator and Union Label Advertiser, West Superior, Wisconsin, n.d. (between 1898 and 1900), Collection of Materials Regarding Union Labels, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. Although Steward did not elaborate on the connection, the labor boycott was clearly based upon these same principles. Rather than the carrot promised by working-class consumption, however, it relied on the stick of organized nonparticipation in the market.Google Scholar

67. “Less Hours,” 2, in Steward, “The Political Economy of Eight Hours.”Google Scholar