The New Deal Meets A&P: Chain Store Laws in the Golden Age of the Consumer

Recent historiography depicts the New Deal as the first national administration to give voice to the consumer. New Deal officials themselves promoted this image, and it suits today's needs by giving agency to a consumer movement rooted in socialist activism, and especially to women. But the consumerist version of the history of the 1930s neglects evidence pointing strongly in the other direction: the chain store wars. Throughout the decade, New Deal supporters in city and state governments, as well as in Washington, passed law after law to protect the interest of independent shopkeepers by punishing chain stores. At the state and local level, these laws imposed punitive taxes. At the federal level, Congress passed the Robinson-Patman Act, to restrict discounted sales to merchants, and came close to passing national chain-store taxation. Such laws were flagrantly anti-consumer, and for a time they succeeded in their intent to raise consumer prices for the benefit of business. This paper explores the contradiction between the New Deal's consumerist ideology and the desire to limit the spread of low-cost chain retail stores.