IS IT A SECRET IF EVERY 5TH GRADER KNOWS IT?:

Armies of Consumers: 1776's Secret Weapon? (EMILY EAKIN, 2/28/04, NY Times)

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. But this lucrative spending habit, he warned, should not be taken for granted.

The colonists could either produce necessities themselves or do without, he testified. As for "mere articles of fashion," he said, they "will now be detested and rejected."

A month later the Stamp Act was repealed. And American trade in British goods — valued at more than a million pounds a year — continued at a galloping pace. But Franklin's words represented a turning point in the struggle for independence, says T. H. Breen, the William Smith Mason professor of American history at Northwestern. Americans, he argues, had discovered a political weapon without which the Revolution might not have been successful: consumerism.

Is it possible that a signature attribute of contemporary America — and a trait for which it is frequently criticized — lay at the heart of its most inspiring foundational achievement? This is the startling implication of Mr. Breen's new book, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, published earlier this month 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: two and a half 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. By the time the First Continental Congress was convened in September 1774, transforming mass consumer mobilization into a successful political rebellion was a relatively straightforward task.

Have they changed how they teach the Revolution in schools? Doesn't everyone still learn that, regardless of its other ideological underpinnings, it was precipitated by taxation without representation?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2004 9:10 AM