Early consumer resistance attacked advertising to defend the free market, not to criticize capitalism.

Evidence

Both encapsulating and amplifying an emergent disenchantment with the high-handedness of advertising, Your Money’s Worth would become a bestseller, known in its time as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the consumer movement, and, along with the Depression, it sparked another major revolt—another period of consumer resistance. The authors knew their success owed in part to a perspective that was, in their words, “in no sense revolutionary.” Chase and Schlink were no critics of the free market, private property, or any other defining feature of American capitalism. Indeed, it was in the defense of the market’s integrity that they attacked advertising, which, with its misleading and deceptive claims, and manufactured demand for relatively needless products, was distorting the economy to the nation’s detriment. In the wake of the book’s success, in 1929 the authors founded Consumers’ Research Incorporated, which aimed to be the world’s first scientific consumer product testing service. The new organization produced a confidential newsletter—the Consumers’ Research General Bulletin—which supplied its subscribers with secret reviews of products and product claims, based on rigorous testing. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 259

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did this pro-market, anti-advertising impulse evolve into the broader consumer movement, and where did it break from its market-defending origins?
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader attention-industry history — the consumer-resistance wave of the 1930s as an earlier counterpoint to today’s platform-critique movements. — connects to: Early internet programmers and even CEOs resisted advertising on principle as intrusive — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 728; The advertising industry branded 1930s consumer protection efforts as communist subversion — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 264

Broader Connections

• The advertising industry branded 1930s consumer protection efforts as communist subversion #exemplifies (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 264