'A Consumers' War': Price Control and Political Consumerism in the United States and Canada during World War II

A Consumers' War analyzes the transnational yet distinct efforts of American and Canadian consumer activists to empower consumers as a pivotal, democratizing force in the political economy of consumer capitalism during and immediately following World War II. Consumer activists---mostly female and middle-class---sought to use the major agencies regulating consumption---the US Office of Price Administration (OPA) and the Canadian Wartime Prices and Trade Board (WPTB)---to mobilize consumer citizens and expand consumers' rights and representation in economic policy-making.;Drawing on a historical-institutionalist framework, A Consumers' War argues that the most salient factors that explain the different impacts of Canadian and American political consumerism were political. Distinctive political processes and contexts shaped a more favourable outcome for Canadian consumerists. The decentralized, conflict-ridden American political process facilitated right-wing efforts to block consumerist progress, and the US Consumer Division's more radical vision provoked a political backlash from the ascendant anti-New Deal coalition. In contrast, the centralized, decisive Canadian political process gave wartime institutions more definitive powers, which benefitted the WPTB and the Consumer Branch, and the moderate consumerism of the branch---which had close ties to the governing Liberal Party, couched its role in the tradition of middle-class women's activism rather than consumer radicalism, and was less confrontational with business than its American counterparts---provoked little overt political opposition. This dissertation confirms what recent transnational Canada--US studies have shown---the border has mattered more in political than economic, social, and cultural terms.;The hotly contested efforts of American consumer activists to advance their political consumerist agenda through the Consumer Division and Consumer Advisory Committee of the OPA contrasts with the less controversial experience of Canadian consumer activists in the Consumer Branch of the WPTB. Ironically, consumer activists enjoyed less success in the United States---where activists were drawing on a politically influential pre-war consumer movement and building on New Deal consumer representation precedents---than in Canada, the consumer movement laggard. Yet even in Canada, wartime successes were partial and transitory. In both countries, postwar anticommunist attacks helped discredit the radical consumerist vision of mobilizing consumer citizens as a countervailing power.