Introduction. During December 1951, half of the adult population of the industrial town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, took regular breaks from work to study economics on
During December 1951, half of the adult population of the industrial town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, took regular breaks from work to study economics on company time. Employees from nineteen firms gathered in small groups to watch a series of films and to participate in discussions that focused on the values and symbols associated with the American way of life, including patriotism, freedom, individualism, competition, and abundance through increasing productivity. That these firms halted production and pulled workers off the shop floor and out of offices for such a purpose was not an anomaly; in the years after World War II, millions of workers participated in similar corporate-sponsored economic education programs. Moreover, they and their families were exposed to these values and symbols in a myriad of other ways: through the mass media in articles, posters and billboards, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and radio and television programs; through the pageantry of business-orchestrated Americanism Weeks; through corporate industrial and community relations programs; and through business-sponsored educational programs aimed at schools and churches. All this activity was part of a systematic campaign launched by American business in the late thirties but pursued with even greater vigor after World War II to shape the Ideas and images that constituted America's political culture.
This was not the first time that corporate leaders had attempted to shape the contours of political discourse. During the Progressive Era and the early twenties, understanding that "what people come to believe and what they happen to do is an effect of a long-term process of persuasion," business struggled for the ideological loyalty of the American working class. As Gary Gerstle has observed, much of this struggle turned on the meaning of Americanism. During this period, business sought to construct a vision of Americanism that emphasized social harmony, free enterprise, individual rights, and abundance. On the eve of the Depression, much of the business community was confident that these values dominated the political and cultural landscape. Business power and autonomy appeared secure.
The Depression of the thirties wrought profound changes in American politics, government, and economy. Business lost enormous prestige and power as it came under increasing public attack and governmental regulation. In turn, having lost trust in the ability of ethnic communities and employers to provide welfare, security, and employment, much of the working class shifted its allegiance to the Democratic party and organized labor. For these workers the values associated with the business definition of the American way receded. Instead of individualism, competition, and free enterprise, workers adopted a vision characterized by equal rights, industrial democracy, economic equality, and social justice. The preferred mechanisms for attaining these goals were collective action at the workplace and an active welfare state authorized to intervene in workings of the economy and, if necessary, to redistribute income.
The demands of World War II continued to challenge business. While the wartime "miracle of production" allowed industrialists to begin rebuilding their reputations, it failed to completely restore their authority within the American polity. Business leaders feared that the war had tightened the bonds between workers and their new protectors, the state and organized labor. Government control and planning played major roles in the wartime economy and wartime regulations. Labor-market shortages enabled organized labor to consolidate its position and to achieve significant gains. Moreover, some union leaders threatened to advance negotiations beyond the standard personnel policy and wage issues into such previously forbidden areas of corporate policy as pricing and investment, essentially demanding a voice in the management of Industry. In the realm of politics, the industrial union wing of the labor movement adopted a social agenda featuring a full employment welfare state that promised comprehensive social protection for workers. Business feared that the formation of the CIO's Political Action Committee heralded a more politically aggressive labor movement prepared to exploit workers' dual allegiance to unions and the Democratic party. Thus, as the war ended, such major national issues as the relationship of the government and the economy, the proper size and activities of the welfare state, and the scope of union power in the factory were unresolved.
In 1946, the contentious atmosphere of industrial relations culminated in a strike wave unparalleled in American history. Especially frightening to the business community was Walter Reuther's demand that GM open its books to union contract negotiators in order to link wages, prices, and profits. His demand exemplified the growing threat to management rights both on and off the shop floor. Equally troubling to many companies was the seemingly widespread community support for labor during these struggles. In the aftermath of the strikes, labor appeared so powerful that labor-relations scholar Sumner H. Slichter could easily foresee the United States "gradually shifting from a capitalistic community to a laboristic one—that is to a community in which employees rather than businessmen are the strongest single influence."
Looking back from the vantage point of the 1990s, it seems clear that the threat posed by New Deal liberalism and the trade union movement was more apparent than real. As Alan Brinkley has shown, by the end of the war liberals had significantly lowered their sights. They shifted from demanding that the state control the economy through social planning and extensive business regulation to advocating that the government promote economic growth while only occasionally compensating for the private sector's failures through social welfare and social insurance. An expanding economy, a demand that easily meshed with business's goals, rather than the reform of capitalism became the clarion call of American liberalism and the Democratic party.
Labor historians contend that the union movement underwent a similar conversion on the way to becoming integrated into the newly emerging liberal consensus. Nelson Lichtenstein, for instance, argues that between 1946 and 1948 a full-scale mobilization of business and conservative forces, featuring passage of the Taft-Hartley Act and aggressive corporate collective bargaining, decisively blocked unions from reshaping the postwar political economy along social democratic lines. In the shop, a labor-capital accord emerged with unions abandoning their quest for industrial control in return for periodic wage and benefit increases. In politics, labor shelved its "earlier commitment to economic planning and social solidarity" for a program emphasizing "sustained growth and productivity gain-sharing" with a small expansion of the welfare state. At the same time, an alliance with the Democratic party, which entailed driving out the communists and undermining the militancy of the rank and file, limited labor's ability to act as an independent political force.
By 1948, neither labor nor liberalism appeared to pose much of a challenge to organized business. Indeed most historians in portraying the fifties emphasize the apparent harmony not only between these groups but within society as a whole. It is a period characterized by most historians as a time of consensus that enveloped liberals as well as conservatives. They emphasize that this consensus rested on a common set of assumptions shared by most Americans that included a belief in equality of opportunity for individuals, in the existence of an open, classless society and in the emergence of an economy capable of dynamic growth and change. While inequalities might still exist, abundance promised to deliver all Americans into the "broad, prosperous middle class." The very success many union workers achieved with little overt class conflict helped convince historians that the fifties was an era of consensus.7
However, to American business leaders in 1945, or even a decade later, very little of this was self-evident. We should not underestimate their fears, even if from a contemporary perspective they seem unfounded. As Howell Harris observed in his excellent study of the immediate postwar mobilization of industrialists, business leaders may have exaggerated the seriousness of their problems, but they were "players in a power game, with a lot to lose."
It was easy for much of the business community to find evidence for its worries. A great deal of conflict underlay the apparent consensus. Until the mid-fifties unions were still growing and conflict over the pace and organization of work continued to characterize the postwar shop floor. Even in the sectors where the labor-capital accord reigned, few American managers accepted the legitimacy of organized labor and most maintained a deep-seated resistance to unions. At the same time, liberalism's swing to the politics of growth and anticom-munism did little to allay corporate hostility. Historian David Brody has observed that "power and interest can be issues of deadly conflict even in a system in which men agree on the fundamentals.
Postwar liberals may have abandoned Issues of social and economic control, but their commitment to an expansion of the welfare state, even if at times only rhetorical, roused the ire of all but the most moderate business leaders. Most of the business community still disliked the liberal agenda, even in its modified form, and feared that the New Deal traditions associated with the labor movement and the Democratic party continued to appeal to many American workers.
Important segments of the business community responded to this economic and ideological challenge with an aggressive campaign to recast the political economy of America. They sought to undermine the legitimacy and power of organized labor and to "halt the momentum of New Deal liberalism." The mobilization began in the late thirties but was "at least partially adjourned" during World War II.
The postwar years, however, witnessed an even more powerful remo-bilization of business as employers stepped forward to shape national soda! and economic policies. The most visible aspects of the battle for power took place over major policy issues at the national level, pitting executives of large firms and major business organizations, like the National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce, against liberal Democratic and union leaders. Business's weapons included such techniques as lobbying, cam-paign financing, and litigation.
Less obvious, but equally significant, was the struggle led by national business leaders and smaller employers at the local level to reshape the ideas, images, and attitudes through which Americans understood their world, specifically their understanding of their relationships to the corporation and the state. This required reorienting workers away from their new-found loyalties to organized labor and government. It is this struggle to create a more conservative, consensual political climate which undermined the power of labor that is the central concern of this book. Enlightened managers would shape not only national policies but also American values. Accordingly, corporate leaders constructed and sold a specific vision of the reciprocal relationship of businesses and citizens that stressed mutual rights and responsibilities. In this vision, corporate leaders claimed the right to control America's economic destiny without significant interference from unions or the state while acknowledging their responsibility to make the benefits of industrial capitalism available to all. Economic growth rather than the redistribution of income proposed by unionists would allow business to uphold its end of the bargain. The key, as the Committee for Economic Development's research director pointed out in 1947, was productivity. He asserted productivity was "a vitally needed lubricant to reduce class and group frictions. As long as we can get more by increasing the size of the pie there is not nearly so much temptation to try to get a bigger slice at the expense of others." In short, the business vision linked economic success with freedom, individualism and productivity. In projecting this vision, business reached back to the political language of the twenties, once again associating the American way with a harmonious, classless society, with nationalism, individual rights, free enterprise, and abundance rising from ever increasing productivity.
The struggle to undercut organized labor's and the state's ideological hold over the working class and to project this vision took place within a variety of contexts. At the national level, business organizations like the Advertising Council and the National Association of
Manufacturers orchestrated multimillion dollar public relations campaigns that relied on newspapers, magazines, radio, and later television to reeducate the public in the principles and benefits of the American economic system.
Recognizing the need for a more direct connection with the public, employers reached out to workers and their communities. At the workplace, employers sought to undermine unionism and address shop-floor conflict by building a separate company identity or company consciousness among their employees. This involved convincing workers to identify their social, economic, and political well-being with that of their specific employer and more broadly with the free enterprise system. To build allegiance to the firm, employers revitalized mechanisms associated with corporate efforts during the twenties to build a privatized welfare state that emphasized the mutual interests of worker and manager.
Understanding the importance of the outside world in shaping the limits of workplace legitimacy, business leaders also challenged their opponents for power and influence outside the factory gates. Their goals were twofold: first to build good will in the community in order to create a favorable climate for economic expansion; second, to shift political dialogue to a more conservative position in order to weaken organized labor and liberalism. Community, then, took on a renewed importance for business leaders worried about the decline of corporate power.
To achieve these goals, employers tried to construct a favorable image of business as a good neighbor by demonstrating both their social consciousness and the importance of the company to the community. Efforts ranged from publicizing company contributions to the local economy to beautifying plants and opening them to the public. Equally important were local public relations campaigns selling business's political agenda. Exploiting rising anticommunism, business warned of the decline of America's values, morals, and freedoms due to government's and labor's attacks on the free enterprise system. An important component of this campaign was an attempt to reassert business dominance over institutional life by influencing such important community agencies as schools and churches.
It is, of course, misleading to treat business as a monolithic force capable of manipulating people and institutions at will. There were major divisions among business leaders, and they often conflicted over how best to preserve the capitalist system. Historians have analyzed these divisions along structural-functional lines; that is, between large and small, or between newer, mass consumption-oriented firms often with strong international connections and domestic-oriented, labor-intensive, primary goods producers. They argue that these different groups coalesced in competing business organizations, such as the more conservative National Association of Manufacturers, as opposed to the Committee for Economic Development, often characterized as moderately conservative or even liberal. While the NAM and its membership rigidly fought any state encroachment on business freedom, the CED and its supporters are described as welcoming the emergence of industrial unionism and the development of a more powerful governmental role within the economy. While such an analysis is a useful tool for classifying the business community, it tends to leave out considerations of individual inclinations and choices that often do not conform to structural categories. To which wing of the business community employers migrated often reflected less where their firm fit in the market and more whether they were tacticians trying to work within the realm of the possible, or whether they were driven by purely dogmatic or ideological considerations. Finally, as the historian Robert Griffith contends, the "differences among these powerful associations" has "probably been exaggerated ... given their overlapping memberships, financial support, and shared assumptions." u Divisions, then, were often less important than a unity of purpose within much of the business community on certain key issues, in particular, the necessity of halting the advance of the welfare state and of undermining the legitimacy and power of organized labor.
As a result, all the major business organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce, the CED, and the NAM as well as industry-specific bodies like the Iron and Steel Institute, were heavily involved in the campaign to shape America's political culture. So too, were an array of companies that varied in size and crossed industrial divisions. Most firms with extensive economic education, human relations, community and public relations programs were labor intensive, primary goods producers like General Motors, Ford, Caterpillar, or U.S. Steel. But one also finds General Electric, Johnson and Johnson, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and General Foods, companies that according to the structural analysis should have had little interest in these activities.
Diversity in ideological orientation also characterized the business leaders active in reshaping America's political climate. A group of NAM leaders, tending toward extreme conservatism and representing firms that successfully resisted unionization, were among the most committed to changing the political climate. Charles R. Hook of
American Rolling Mill, Henning W. Prentis of Armstrong Cork, J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, and Jasper Crane of Du Pont, for instance, helped initiate the earliest NAM campaigns against the New Deal. Ardent defenders of traditional business values, they helped form an interlocking network of business leaders that financially supported and provided leadership to numerous organizations promulgating free enterprise ideology after World War II, including Spiritual Mobilization, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Freedoms Foundation, Harding College, and Junior Achievement.
Also, very involved, however, were employers representing unionized firms struggling to contain organized labor. John L. McCaffrey and Fowler McCormick of International Harvester, B. E. Hutchinson of Chrysler, and S. C. Atlyn of National Cash Register fell into this category. Finally, not to be overlooked were corporate leaders often characterized as moderates, like Harry Bullis of General Mills or Charles E. Wilson of General Electric. Both were members of the NAM as well as CED trustees and were at the forefront of the CED's efforts to remold education and religion. At times, conservative and moderate business leaders might struggle over the details of the business message, but they agreed on certain fundamental principles, particularly the need to emphasize individualism, freedom, and productivity.
It is also important to understand the ways that business interacted with its opposition, primarily organized labor. Workers and their unions resisted and reshaped employer actions. One segment of organized labor, unions associated with the CIO, actively competed with business in the effort to shape worker consciousness. This study, then, will focus primarily on the industrial unions that most actively contested business for worker loyalty and public sympathy. During the Depression and World War II, unions had become an increasingly potent force not only in the plant and in national politics but also in local communities, establishing connections that grew in the postwar era with important community institutions. Later, particularly as attacks against labor increased during the fifties, unions began to emulate business, conducting their own public relations campaigns. Unions drew on a vision of the American way that emphasized equal rights and social and economic justice. They promoted the notion that worker success and security as well as America's future depended on the collective power of organized labor and on the continued ability of the state to regulate business. As we will see, organized labor had difficulty matching the resources available to the leaders of American business.
To capture and untangle the complex struggle over political cultare, this study moves through time and across space. It is organized into five parts. In the first part, I examine in narrative form the ebb and flow of the employer counteroffensive at the national level from the 1930s through the CIO period. I explore the strategic program embarked upon by corporate leaders to regain not only political and economic but also ideological initiatives. Well-orchestrated public relations campaigns helped capital gain strength in the Immediate postwar years. Although, business suffered an unexpected reversal in 1948, it regained its footing in the early fifties with major political victories. By mid-decade, with the CIO in disarray, capital appeared well on the way to securing its hegemony.
Business success resulted from national political events only in part, however. In the next three sections, I take apart and analyze the various elements that helped build business's political hegemony. Each part moves back in time and focuses on the various arenas in which employers sought to shape political consciousness during the forties and fifties. In part 2,1 examine the competing company and union efforts to reach workers at the workplace. The next section moves beyond worksites to explore the struggle between unions and companies for power and influence in the community. In part 4,1 analyze more closely the important role of institutions—particularly those of education and religion—in the struggle for public opinion. Conflict over churches and schools highlights not only the continuing divisions between capital and labor but also the ideological divisions within the business community itself. Conservatives of the NAM and the moderates of the CED promoted different visions of political economy. In these arenas, however, the CED's more moderate message predominated.
In the last part, I return to the narrative and the political arena, beginning with the merger of the AFL and the CIO in 1955. Although business had scored major victories, important elements of the business community were still not satisfied with what they had achieved. In the wake of the merger, the most conservative wing of the business community remained worried about labor and liberalism's apparent continuing strength. As headlines portended the onslaught of a labor juggernaut, the hardline labor policies of the NAM came to the forefront of employers' political agenda. The book concludes by examining the conservative-led drive to redraw the laws governing labor relations at both the state and federal levels. For business and labor, public opinion was a critical element of this struggle.
Assessing the impact of the business community's campaign to shape political culture is a difficult task. Even most companies took it as a matter of faith that the dollars they invested in national educational campaigns and In the workplace or community programs often paid off only in intangible ways. But, by the end of the 1950s, the business community could point to favorable results. Liberal hopes for a fully articulated welfare state had been crushed, while union representation of the labor force had begun its long decline. Meanwhile, the popular image of organized labor shifted from the heroic defenders of the New Deal to just another special interest group. It would be facile to draw a straight line between the subject of this book, business'* ideological campaigns, and the social, political, and economic changes that took place during the fifties. Certainly, the impact of such factors as the cold war, high employment, consumerism, shifting sectors of employment, and suburbanization should not be ignored. Nor should we, however, underestimate the significance of the business community's effort to redefine the meaning of Americanism to emphasize individualistic as opposed to mu-tualistic ways of dealing with inequality.
Notes
1. "In Our Hands—Workers Talk Economics," Modem Industry 22 (July 15, 1951): 41-45; Latrobe Bulletin, Apr. 10, 1951.
2. Sarah Lyons Watts, Order against Chaos: Business Culture and Labor Ideology in America, 1880-191S (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 1-31; Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 69-70; Gary Gerstle, Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
3. On the impact of the Depression on workers, see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 252-89.
4. Slichter quoted in David Brody, Workers in Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 174.
5. Alan Brinkley, "The New Deal and the Idea of the State," in The Rise and Fail of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 85-112.
6. Nelson Llchtensteln, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Fraser and Gerstle, pp. 122-45, esp. 123.
7. See, for example, J. Ronald Oakley, Gods Country: America in the Fifties (New York: Dembner Books, 1986), pp. 314-19, esp. p. 315.
8. Howell Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 8.
9. Brody, Workers in Industrial America, p. 127.
10. For an overview of the business community's mobilization during the Truman years see Robert Griffith, "Forging America's Postwar Order; Domestic Politics and Political Economy in the Age of Truman," in The Truman Presidency, ed. Michael J. Lacey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 57-88, esp. 63.
11. Richard S. Tedlow, Keeping the Corporate Image: Public Relations and Business, 1900-1950 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1979), and Harris, The Right to Manage, have begun to explore corporate efforts to shape the political climate. Tedlow focuses on the history of corporate public relations, especially advertising. Harris addresses similar issues but primarily emphasizes management's efforts to win workers' loyalty within the confines of the shop and argues that business's fight for influence was over by the end of the forties. This study finds a business class shaken by the results of the 1948 election and intensifying Us struggle for influence through the 1950s. It moves beyond the factory into homes, schools, and churches and explores organized labor's efforts to challenge business's cultural onslaught.
12. For a cogent analysis of the concept of productivity within postwar political economy discourse, see Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 63-69, 121-52, quote from p. 65.
13. 1 want to thank David Farber of Barnard College for suggestions concerning the various classifications of the business community. Some of his points have been incorporated here. Thomas Ferguson, "Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Fraser and Gerst-le, pp. 3-24; Maier, In Search of Stability, pp. 55-63; Griffith, "Forging America's Postwar Order," p. 67. For a different perspective on unity in the business community, see Colin Gordon, "New Deal, Old Deck: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920-1935" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1990).