ABSTRACT
Early seeds of the consumer movement were planted at the start of the twentieth century, when a variety of state and federal laws aimed at maintaining the purity of food and drug products were passed. A second thrust developed in the 1930s with the passage of disclosure legislation that was intended to protect consumers from mislabeled or fraudulently labeled merchandise and false advertising. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, consumer protectionism developed along a third line: specifying product standards for the alleged purpose of making all consumer products safer. Taken together, these three efforts, as they have developed over the past eighty years, constitute the contemporary American consumer protection movement.
