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“The Spice of the Department Store”: The “Consumers' Republic,” Imported Knock-Offs from Latin America, and the Invention of International Development, 1936–1941

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2012

Augustine Sedgewick
Augustine Sedgewick
Affiliation:
University of South Florida
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Abstract

Major recent work in US history has credited the New Deal with a dubious double legacy. One group of historians has shown how Roosevelt's domestic policies subsidized the consolidation of a political economy and culture of mass consumption, while another has described how his foreign policies generated the strategies and institutions of neoimperialism. Scholars have analyzed these developments in isolation, but this essay demonstrates that they were linked and synergistic. Working from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to the nascent program for multilateral international development, it argues that an integrated complex of New Deal domestic and foreign policies harnessed the rise of the United States as a “consumers' republic” to the forms of imperialism refined in Latin America in the thirties and forties and deployed globally after the war. This policy complex rationalized the global production of US mass-consumer prosperity, displaced the costs of the Keynesian rehabilitation of US capitalism abroad, and evolved to regulate the metabolism between domestic mass consumerism and international hegemony after 1945.

Type
Labor and Global Commodities
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 81 , Spring 2012 , pp. 49 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2012

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References

NOTES

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