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\"How much does it cost?\" We think of this question as one that preoccupies the nation's shoppers, not its statesmen. But, asPocketbook Politicsdramatically shows, the twentieth-century American polity in fact developed in response to that very consumer concern. In this groundbreaking study, Meg Jacobs demonstrates how pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on public anger over the high cost of living. Beginning with the explosion of prices at the turn of the century, every strike, demonstration, and boycott was, in effect, a protest against rising prices and inadequate income. On one side, a reform coalition of ordinary Americans, mass retailers, and national politicians fought for laws and policies that promoted militant unionism, government price controls, and a Keynesian program of full employment. On the other, small businessmen fiercely resisted this low-price, high-wage agenda that threatened to bankrupt them. This book recaptures this dramatic struggle, beginning with the immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Italian women who flocked to Edward Filene's famous Boston bargain basement that opened in 1909 and ending with the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Pocketbook Politicsoffers a new interpretation of state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Unlike most social historians who focus exclusively on consumers at the grass-roots, Jacobs breaks new methodological ground by insisting on the centrality of national politics and the state in the nearly century-long fight to fulfill the American Dream of abundance.

The author has \"tried to understand the realities of Soviet society, drawing both upon a superb critical judgment and a warmly sympathetic human insight.\" He \"has given the American public material for thought and a prod in the right direction.\" Originally published in 1960. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

''You in the West see yourselves as 'the Free World,' but it was [Chester Bowles] who knew that we in emerging Asia and Africa see you as 'the Rich Nations.' '' ''Bowles had a world view; he compared Gandhi in southern Africa, then Natal and Transvaal, to Washington at Valley Forge and Bolivar at Boyaca. No American, before or since, has had that kind of intellect or sensitivity.'' They recalled pictures of the man, the lean, smiling face, the close-cropped hair, and they wondered aloud what would have happened had American policy after Indian independence from England been predicated on Mr. Bowles's understanding rather than that of former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and others who little appreciated Gandhi and Nehru - better if Mr. Bowles had been the architect for Indian-American relations (they reminded me that he was one of the craftsmen of the 1960 Democratic platform). They dissected the United States alliance with Pakistan's military dictatorship and the pact that India, the world's largest democracy, has with the Soviet Union. And the students mentioned with pride that Mr. Bowles told President Truman that he preferred an ambassadorship to India, rather than to Europe, citing his belief that ''the history of our time will be written largely in Asia.''

This chapter covers the period from the end of the Franco-American summit in June 1961 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. During this juncture the policy dispute over Vietnam was neither the biggest stumbling block in the Franco-American relationship nor one that had come out into the open, but it certainly was a festering source of mutual dissatisfaction. The White House, increasingly annoyed with French “obstructionism” and unable to see beyond a perception that de Gaulle harbored wartime grudges with the “Anglo-Saxons” and was reflexively anti-American, expected little from another presidential tete-à-tete and constantly rebuffed French efforts to restore some civility. Voices in the American bureaucracy moderately sympathetic to French aims were either removed or marginalized and the American embassy in Saigon emerged as a particularly hostile voice against French policy in Vietnam. The hardening of American policy toward France grew to the point that Kennedy privately admitted in mid-1962 that he had completely given up on finding any common ground with de Gaulle. Distrustful of French motives, the administration dismissed evidence of growing French influence on both sides of the 17th parallel and signs that de Gaulle actually had the high-level connections necessary to begin negotiating a solution to the war.

About the same time, he became a member of America First, believing himself to be, he said, one of ''a small group of internationalists opposed to America's participation in the war.'' He later expressed ''public regret'' for having been associated for a ''brief interlude'' with what turned out to be, he said, an isolationist movement. Turned Down by Navy Later, in ''The Coming Political Breakthrough,'' 1 of 11 books he was to write, Mr. Bowles said the ''premature dismantling of the anti-inflationary program'' had brought about ''a really serious price inflation.'' In 1951 Mr. Bowles's old friend and admirer, President [Harry S. Truman], appointed him Ambassador to India and the first Ambassador to Nepal. Mr. Bowles's old enemies in the Senate were waiting to try to block the appointment. In confirmation hearings Senator Robert A. Taft, Republican of Ohio, charged that Mr. Bowles, while at the Office of Price Administration, had ''antagonized'' everyone who tried to deal with him. Mr. Bowles's nomination was finally confirmed by a margin of 43 to 33.