Letters from an American - November 25, 2025

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

November 25, 2025. Last week, a poll conducted for Global EV Alliance, made up of electric vehicle driver associations around the world, found that 52% of Americans would avoid buying a Tesla for political reasons. Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk pumped more than $290 million in to electing President Donald J. Trump and supporting the Republicans in 2024. After taking office,

Trump named Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency, a group that slashed through government programs and fired civil servants. In response, protesters organized Tesla takedowns, gathering at Tesla dealerships to urge people not to buy the vehicles. The protests spread internationally. In March, Trump advertised, Teslas on the south lawn of the White House to try to help slumping sales, to no avail.

In September, consumers flexed their muscle over parent company Disney's suspension of Jimmy Kimmel's late-night talk show on ABC, after pressure from Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr over Kimmel's comments following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. About 3 million subscribers canceled Disney Plus in September, while Hulu, which Disney owns, lost 4.1 million. Monthly cancellations previously had averaged 1.2 million and 1.9 million respectively. While not all of those cancellations could be chalked up to consumer anger over Kimmel's suspension, Disney subscription prices went up at around the same time. Kimmel was back on the air in five days. Every day, I am struck by all the ways in which we are reliving the 1890s.

In that era, too, consumers organized, using their buying power to affect politics. As the first General Secretary of the National Consumers League, Florence Kelly, put it, to live means to buy. To buy means to have power. To have power means to have responsibility. After the Civil War, an economic boom in the North combined with the loss of young men in the war to make education more accessible to young white women. By 1870, girls made up the majority of high school graduates. Fewer than 2% of college-age Americans went to college, women made up 21% of that group. Away from the confines of home, these privileged young women studied. social problems and the means of addressing them while they develop friendships with like-minded classmates.

In the mid-1880s, those women began to experiment with using their talents and newfound friendships to repair the nation's social fabric that had been torn by urbanization and industrialization. To recreate a web of social responsibility in the growing industrial cities, young middle-class women moved into ethnic, working-class neighborhoods. working-class neighborhoods to minister to the people living there. Jane Adams, who opened Chicago's Hall House with Ellen Gate Star in 1889, rejected the idea of a nation divided by haves and have-nots. She believed that all individuals were fundamentally interconnected.

Hall House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal, Adams later wrote. The people who lived in these settlement houses dedicated themselves to filing down the sharp edges of industrialization with its tenement housing, low wages, long hours, child labor, and disease, along with polluted air and water and unregulated food. They turned their education to addressing the immediate problems in front of them, collecting statistics to build a larger picture of the social cost,

of industrialization, and lobbying government officials and businessmen to improve the condition of workers, especially women and children. They soon discovered a different lever for change. In the midterm election of 1890, politicians recognized the power of women to swing the vote for or against a political party. When Republicans got shellacked, their leaders blamed women, who were increasingly the family shoppers, shoppers for urging their husbands to vote against the party that had forced through the McKinley tariff of that year, raising tariff rates and thus raising consumer prices. Thomas Reed, the Republican Speaker of the House, complained the party had been defeated by the shopping woman. Historian Kathy Pice notes that between 1885 and 1910, the six women's magazines known as the Big Six were

founded, including Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, and Good Housekeeping. By 1895, advertisements were strategically placed near recipes throughout the magazines, and brand names were scattered through their stories, a recognition of women's role as shoppers. Increasingly, reform-minded women were turning to women's roles as consumers to reshape America's industrialism. They came to believe that the ultimate responsibility for poor conditions lodges in the consumer. Leveraging the power of consumption could force employers to pay higher wages, establish better conditions, and protect workers. In 1891, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose brother Robert Gould Shaw had commanded black soldiers in the Massachusetts 54th in the 1863 Second Battle of Fort Wagner, helped to form

the Consumers League of the City of New York, patterned after a similar English organization to rally consumers to support better conditions for the workers who made the goods they bought. In 1890, Lowell and Jane Adams founded the National Consumers League with Florence Kelly at its head. The organization worked to combat child labor and poor working conditions, and in an era when milk was commonly adulterated with chalk and formaldehyde and candies were decorated with lead paint, lobbied for government regulation of food and drugs. Today, the relationship between consumption and reform has taken on heightened meaning after the Tesla and the Disney boycotts. The day after Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday shopping season, and like their predecessors

of a century ago, reformers are focusing on consumers' power. to push back on the policies of the Trump administration, launching a campaign they call, we ain't buying it. We aren't just consumers, we're community builders, their website says. We're driving the change we want to see and demanding respect. As Joanne Reid put it in an Instagram video,

Dear retailers who've decided you don't like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away. Here's the thing. We ain't buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain't buying it. She explained, we're going to spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We're going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants' rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We're going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain't that, we ain't buying it. Let's show them our power, she told listeners. Let's show them what we can do together. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead and Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.