At this point in time most consumers in the city and nation still supported price controls, although that would change by election time as shortages persisted. The subsequent Republican rout was reversed two years later when prices skyrocketed after controls were lifted. This week, the News reported, the New York League of Women Shoppers was sending a telegram to President Truman urging continuation of price controls. A motorcade of housewives representing all 48 states was planned in DC to demand the continuation of OPA without crippling amendments. The group claimed that polls show anywhere from 73%-90% of voters were in agreement. The participants included official representatives of the National Federation of Women's Clubs, American Association of University Women, American Veterans of World War II, Council of Jewish Women, National Farmers' Union, and the National League of Women Voters.
Business interests fought back by accusing consumer groups of being Communist-dominated. For instance, the House Un-American Activities Committee tarred the League of Women Shoppers as subversive. It was a grass-roots consumer rights organization founded in 1935 with chapters in most major cities that lobbied for consumer issues such as product labeling but also supported unionization of retail workers, urging shoppers to boycott stores with unfair employee practices. Most likely Communists were involved to some degree- the party was embedded deeply in the retail worker's union- but the League initially had a broad-based membership, including a number of socially prominent women. HUAC was never able to prove that the group was a Communist front relying instead on innuendo to destroy it.
To this day it is difficult, even impossible in many cases, to differentiate groups that were true Communist fronts, whose primary purpose was to recruit members, finance party operations including espionage, and advance the interests of the party and the Soviet Union, from broad-based progressive groups in which the Communist Party had some degree of influence and both from progressive groups that simply had some Communists among its membership but little or no direct Party involvement. The anti-Communists of the day also were split into those who sought to expose covert Communist operations within progressive groups, those who wished to purge all Communist Party members or sympathizers from these groups, those who wished to criminalize Communist Party membership, and those reactionaries with a broader agenda to destroy through innuendo any progressive group that supported unionization, equal rights, civil liberties or consumer protections.
In the 1940s HUAC even included the Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, in its list of subversive organizations. The League of Woman Shoppers would not survive the McCarthy era, although the Consumers Union survived and was eventually taken off the blacklist.