Introduction—Immigration and the American Standard of Living in the Progressive Era: How the Encounter with Foreign Peoples Shaped the Politics of Consumption in the United States

Abstract Contributions to this forum underscore the fact that mass migration during the Progressive Era coincided with the emergence of mass consumption. Progressive Era immigration studies are at the core of the emergent knowledge economy of the age of abundance, centered on an American standard of living that was associated with high wages, affordable goods, more leisure time, and opportunities for material and cultural self-realization. The taxonomies created during the transition to consumer capitalism frequently pathologized immigrants. In their classifications, many Progressive Era protagonists associated immigrants with a low standard of living that manifested itself in unhygienic lifestyles, unhealthy nutrition, and inappropriate consumption. In this reading, categories such as race and ethnicity are part of the construction of the figure of the consumer and the politics of consumption; they reflect modern consumerist subjectivities and structures.