Organized labor's community service activities served as an antidote to business propaganda. Reprinted from AFL-CIO News; courtesy of the George Meany Memorial Archives
The second part spoke more specifically to current political and economic issues. Particularly before the election of Eisenhower, companies engaged in a propaganda campaign to teach general lessons on the importance of free enterprise to the American economic system. Careful not to attack unions too openly for fear that such boldness could alienate workers, conservative employers nevertheless emphasized the idea that only freedom from government regulation could prevent a drift toward statist collectivism. The Allis-Chalmers Company paper, for instance, published an employee poem entitled "My Name Is Profit" that began, "I have been maligned and I have been praised. / My name is hallowed where Industry and Commerce prosper. / Where I am unknown Enterprises cease and Bankruptcy takes over." Similarly, magazine racks, such as those at the American Steel and Wire Company carried titles like Sherman Rogers' The Three Headed Monster, an attack on government spending and high taxes.
Successfully meshing these messages with human relation objectives required company journals to build readership by integrating news about the firm and economics with recreational and educational activities, department gossip, and announcements of special events in the lives of employees. Reading rack services mixed innocuous literature on hobbies and home improvement projects with those carrying an explicit economic message to encourage employees to form the habit of picking up every booklet from the racks and taking them home.
Employers also used more direct means, such as letters, to personalize communications with individual employees. The Public Opinion Index for Industry found that the proportion of surveyed firms writing to employees increased from 28 percent in 1947 to 82 percent in 195S. Its warm, asserted James Black, the Director of Public Relations for the Associated Industries of Cleveland, "It goes right into the home of the worker and his family, and it takes the company with it." Beginning in 1946, Henry Ford II annually sent Christmas letters to every employee and his family. To encourage both loyalty and productivity in the work force, companies wrote to employees about competing firms, customers, future business prospects, and new methods and machinery. Letters, like many other forms of corporate communication, bypassed organized labor. Especially in times of conflict, employers felt these letters served as an important bridge to employees; International Harvester and Chrysler, among others, wrote almost daily to employees during strikes.
Some firms went to great lengths to ensure that workers listened to their messages. In 1956, Kaiser Steel Company put its annual report in a motion picture film and then showed it along with a Hollywood premiere at company-sponsored theater parties to thirty thousand people. Other companies recorded their presidents' reports and sent the phonograph records to the employees' homes. General Aniline & Film Corporation conducted a game called Qunch (quiz-at-lunch), testing workers on their knowledge gained from annual reports, booklets, magazines, and plant papers, of company economics, products, people and history.
Managers argued that two-way communication was essential for verifying if workers were absorbing the employer's message. Attitude surveys were one means for determining what was on employees' minds. One thirty-minute survey developed in 1952 at the University of Chicago was used by Sears, Campbell Soup Company, and others to determine "what keeps the worker happy, enthusiastic, and loyal to his employer." By the mid-fifties, one in five firms was sur-veying its employees. Meetings, particularly in small and medium sized firms, complemented surveys by providing a forum for face-to-face contact with management. Weekly "Understanding Luncheons" provided an "open forum" at such companies as Stanley Home Products, while Timken Roller Bearing Company invited all eleven thousand employees during 1953 to lunch in small groups with management. Many other firms utilized lunch and dinner meetings to explain their company s condition and outlook.
Some firms combined meetings with plant tours, enabling employees to integrate their jobs into the firm's overall operation. Luncheon meetings with a ranking company officer after the tour dealt with such touchy subjects as job ratings and specific grievances. One Chicago company, employing fifteen hundred workers, ended its tour with a conference with the general manager. The employee-tourists, timid at first, soon were "talking openly and with feeling about matters that are of deep concern to them." Enthusiastic responses from veteran workers who gained a new understanding of the company and a sense of pride in their work paid significant dividends, but few companies outdid Lockheed's 1950 tour, which dramatized the value of good workmanship. It ended with chartered flights over Southern California in company-built Constellations for eleven thousand employees on company time to enable them to see how the planes they built performed in the air.
Companies devised some of the most innovative communication techniques to convince employees of the danger of big government and high taxes. Concerned that few employees understood their tax burden, Du Pont dramatized the impact of "hidden taxes" by having an employee and his family pick out all of the merchandise they might have purchased with the money they had paid in taxes between 1947 and 1954 and photographing the collection for its jour-nal. Other companies specifically mobilized workers to demand lower taxes and the creation of a "better business environment." On March 5, 1953, Quaker Oats Company initiated the "non-partisan" Ighat (I'm Gonna Holler About Taxes) campaign in seventeen major plants. Employees circulated Ighat petitions that they sent along with letters and postcards to their Congressmen urging support of legislation to reduce the tax burden. William Kohs, a Quaker Oats maintenance man, who won a contest by collecting antitax petition signatures, shouted "IGHAT" at Senator Everett Dirksen over the telephone. 74
In the postwar decade, industrialists added a greater sophistication to the selling their version of the American economic system. A dozen educational and business organizations and over thirty large firms, ranging from progressives like Johnson & Johnson to such staunch antiunion conservatives as IBM and Du Pont, developed economic education programs, many of which were distributed nationwide to other firms. These entailed taking workers or supervisors off the shop floor for one or more days for a period of three to fifteen hours to participate in discussion classes. Approximately 105,000 Westing-house, 180,000 U.S. Steel and 20,000 Swift Company employees were among the first to be exposed to this new technique. GE demonstrated its commitment to promoting "a better understanding of our American way of life" by assigning an executive full time as "Manager of Economic Training." In early 1951, a leading management consultant observed in the Harvard Business Review that "practically every prominent leader of business in the United States today is talking about teaching economics to employees. Many of the largest corporations have launched economic-education programs. "75
Two of the most popular courses, "How Our Business System Operates" (HOBSO) and "In Our Hands," were initially created by the Du Pont Company and the Borg Warner Company and Inland Steel for their employees but then given to the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Economic Foundation for national distribution. The NAM conducted eight-day institutes for the training of HOBSO discussion leaders at sites throughout the country. By the mid-fifties over five hundred firms had participated in training sessions and were equipped to present the program and its sequel, HOBSO II, to their workers. Beginning in 1950 the American Economic Foundation began distributing "In Our Hands," the Inland Steel and Borg Warner course. Within three years, 1.5 million workers had participated in this program. Nineteen firms in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, for example, co-sponsored the AEF program enabling half the workers of that town to "study economics." The Latrobe Bulletin observed that "we still cannot get used to hearing economics being casually discussed on buses, on street corners, and in the lunchrooms and taverns." Both these programs emphasized the importance of worker participation, because "conclusions reached through participation are understood, accepted, believed, and remembered." To facilitate participation, "In Our Hands" limited group size to fifteen and relied on "unsupervised" discussion led by rank-and-file workers. But the movies and flipcharts utilized by both programs tended to steer discussion to the conclusions desired by management.
In terms of content, economic education fell into three groups— evangelistic, academic, and company oriented. Although there were significant differences in approach, all ultimately led to the goal of generating support for free enterprise. Evangelistic programs, like HOBSO and "In Our Hands," taught "Free Enterprise Economics" by focusing on the accomplishments of the American business system and by exploiting the fear of losing its benefits to encroaching socialism. HOBSO also emphasized the importance of profits, competition, and individual freedom and defended the "capitalistic standard of living against central government control." After the HOBSO sessions one Du Pont worker commented, "I realize what could happen under a socialistic government and now I am going to do all I can to prevent our Government from going socialistic."
Academic programs, like the one developed by the University of Chicago for three thousand Republic Steel supervisors, shunned emotional appeals about the dangers of socialism for a more subtle approach. Such programs purported to teach the basic principles of economics, including issues like costs, stock investment, and the banking system, in order to provide a framework for analyzing economic and social problems. After participating in fifteen educational sessions, Republic Steel foremen were to have developed "an appreciation of the values, benefits and rewards to the individual as part of the Corporation and the Economic system" and an ability to correct workers' misconceptions. Foreman Chris Cutropia reported that the course enabled him to effectively respond to a disgruntled worker who snapped, "Why should I knock myself out for Republic? They make $75 out of every billet of steel and I get nothing." Cutropia, who took the "griper" aside and convinced him that the company would be lucky to make seventy-five cents a billet, recalled that "three months ago I wouldn't have been able to say anything."7 Sears and Standard Oil courses typified company-oriented economic education. They presented to all their employees information specifically about the company—Including its history, products, and financial outlook to enhance organizational rapport in the belief that the best way to generate approval of the economic system was to create feelings of identity with the firm.
Economic education advocates pointed to the opinion polls conducted before and after the presentations to demonstrate how they reshaped worker attitudes. In 1951, before participating in the 'in Our Hands" discussions, half the rank-and-file workers of Sharon Steel Corporation believed, among other things, that there was no real danger to personal freedom if the government took over industry, that the way to increase prosperity was to circulate more money, and that a strong union was the best protection for job security. The post-course survey showed only one quarter of the workers agreed with these propositions. "In Our Hands" also seemingly changed workers' ideas about the best way to improve their standard of living. Exactly S3 percent compared with 33 percent of a precourse audience agreed that the solution was greater production. Similarly, an informal survey of Latrobe workers showed that workers like Paul Palmer of the Toyad Company had learned that "People benefit when the tools of production are in the hands of private individuals rather than under the control and supervision of the government." Without the profit motive, he continued, "inefficiency is bound to creep into our industrial pattern and the loss would be passed on to the taxpayers."
Often, economic education programs had more immediate political goals. In the early fifties, mobilizing support for the Republican party drove many programs. One example is the program developed by the arch-conservative Harding College and presented to workers at General Motors and Swift Company and throughout the Midwest, which openly attacked the Democratic party. The growth pattern of economic education programs reflected this political use. While economic training increased steadily after 1948, the biggest jump occurred during the year before the 1952 presidential election, when the percentage of participating firms increased from 20 to 44 percent. After the Republican victory, the number of active firms receded back to one in five. NAM president Charles Sligh, pleaded against backsliding, warning "the spirit of peace and sweet reasonableness is not going to descend automatically" just because of a political change in Washington. But an Opinion Research Corporation vice president later admitted that "the Republican victory in the national elections has removed the need for explaining so thoroughly the basis of the enterprise system and the threats to its continuation."
In these ways, overtly political communications blended with employers' efforts to develop closer ties with their workers through human relations. Awakened to the growing interaction of the social environment and the factory atmosphere, employers with widely differing ideological perspectives adopted at least some of the language and mechanisms of human relations. Nonunion employers hearkened back to earlier uses of human relations to stifle labor organizing drives. Companies that had already succumbed to unions and collective bargaining expected improved employee relations programs and sophisticated communications to sap the strength and militancy of the unions in their plant. Liberal businessmen tended to be less Interested in these mechanisms as tactics for stealing the worker's loyalty back from unions but nevertheless liked human relations prescriptions for enhancing worker productivity by responding to non-economic needs.
Whatever the desired results in any particular plant, treating the worker with greater dignity and respect was expected to yield bigger payoffs In the society at large. Being able to point to "instances where workers are so well satisfied... that union leaders have not been able to organize them," not only had significance for those instances but assured the American people that business, and not unions, was capable of caring for the average working man or woman. Doing what was necessary "to make the individual honor the privilege of being part of the enterprise" was likely not only to boost that individual's productivity but also to make that individual more prone to accept business's postwar attack on government interference and labor activism. 5 Consequently, unlike earlier attempts to use human relations strictly for a particular firm's narrow interests, the sweeping human relations movement of the postwar years had broad implications for the country's social and economic policies.
All the attention given to the noneconomic factors leading to the satisfaction and motivation of employees was never a complete substitute for improved wages and benefits. Even in the 1920s, human relations was tied to the worker's material well-being. The Depression, however, uncoupled the link attaching the employee's material standard of living to the company. Workers began to shift their loyalties, increasingly focusing on labor unions and government to guarantee their security and prosperity. In the postwar decades, companies sought to recapture the allegiance of their employees by revitalizing an older corporate concern for worker's welfare, a concern that included profit sharing and recreation. To these, business added an intricate web of benefits, including pensions, vacations, health plans, and educational assistance. Even in unionized plants, employers fought hard to claim credit for benefits that labor won through collective bargaining. Like human relations, the postwar version of American welfare capitalism had several purposes. In the narrow sense, recreation, health plans, and profit sharing boosted the worker's company consciousness, hopefully resulting in loyalty and improved productivity. At the same time, welfarism had implications for business's political agenda. If companies were truly providing for their workers' security and prosperity, the New Deal innovations of industrial unionism and the welfare state were unnecessary aberrations.
Welfarism's deep roots in the American economic system gave it a special resonance for postwar employers. With links to the paternalistic relationships between employer and employee in the earliest factories, more systematized welfare programs emerged in the early twentieth century to combat problems caused by the advent of mass production, Taylorism, and unionism. Particularly after the labor turmoil at the end of World War I, progressive employers began to address these problems by developing bureaucratic personnel programs in which welfarism played an important part.
Underpinning welfare capitalism was the concept of management's obligation to secure the well-being of its employees. Employers improved conditions in their factories through safety campaigns, lunchrooms, and even beautified plants, and alleviated many of the hazards of industrial life by providing doctors and insurance plans. Through stock purchasing, pension, and home-ownership plans, managers sought to bind workers closer to the company and decrease the costly turnover rates, while work councils and shop committees encouraged workers to believe that they had a voice in determining wages and working conditions or in settling grievances. Finally, in recreational activities like sports teams and hobby clubs, employers linked company imperatives to the worker's leisure time and offset the monotony of factory work. 87
The welfare capitalism of the 1920s achieved mixed results. Welfarism played at least some part in the precipitous decline in labor activity and the greater stability of the work force during that decade. But employees never passively accepted management's policies; instead, corporate loyalty implied a negotiated compact between management and worker, based on the employer's willingness to compromise on significant issues. While companies achieved a degree of consent, they paid for it through wages and shopfloor concessions.
The Depression, however, severely damaged the notion of mutual responsibility between worker and company. The prolonged economic slump forced most firms to drop expensive programs, while other companies faced competition for control of welfare programs from newly unionized workers. Equally important, government entitlement programs and unionized collective bargaining appeared to promise that business was not the only source of economic security. The company no longer had a free hand to dispense wages and benefits.
Although in disarray, welfarism survived. Companies like Endicott Johnson, NCR, Sears, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber, combined welfare capitalism with a degree of intimidation to combat labor-organizing drives. A few others implemented new benefit schemes to contain the industrial union upsurge. The outbreak of the Second World War brought changes in state policy that breathed new life into welfare capitalism. The drive to promote wartime productivity and industrial harmony led state agencies to support traditional welfare programs like corporate-sponsored industrial recreation. The government also altered corporate tax laws and instituted wage control policies that encouraged the development of employee benefit plans in the private sector. Finally, some firms struggling with labor militancy, turnover, and absenteeism looked to welfarism with renewed favor.
By the late 1940s, management's effort to recapture their employees' loyalty led to an explosion in private-sector welfarism, underwritten by high corporate profits and postwar prosperity. But welfare capitalism had changed. State-sponsored public housing, for instance, limited employer interest in providing homes, which had been a common component of earlier welfare capitalism. Moreover, benefits like pensions, vacations, and health insurance came under the regulation of federal and state law or became meshed in the collective bargaining system. Still, employers hoped that providing an array of benefits and services would translate into greater productivity, higher morale, and increased employee loyalty. They also hoped to weaken worker reliance on unionism and the state.
One program that expanded rapidly following the war was profit sharing. Previously, a small number of companies had distributed profits, usually in the form of cash, shares, or deferred payments to encourage worker loyalty and productivity. All but disappearing in the 1930s, union criticism of high corporate profits in the postwar years renewed employer interest in the plans. The number of profit sharing plans formally approved by the U.S. Treasury Department grew from thirty-seven in 1940 to over twenty thousand in I960.
Firms resisting unionization were particularly attracted to a policy that promised to eliminate the "dividing line," and made workers "feel they belong, that they're not just another cog in the impersonal machine." Not surprisingly, then, in 1950 only 30 percent of the members of the Council of Profit Sharing Industries had contracts with organized labor. Some large nonunion firms like Sears, Procter and Gamble, and Dow Chemical offered profit sharing or stock ownership. Most often, however, smaller companies were behind the programs. Indeed, for many small and medium sized firms, profit sharing anchored a paternalistic personnel program designed to raise productivity while resisting unions.
Beyond its immediate practical benefits, profit sharing generated great excitement among employers because it appealed to their broader class interests. Business leaders, who feared for the future of capitalism, believed that profit sharing's significance lay in strengthening the "spirit of capitalism" in the American social and political system. Strange J. Porter, personnel director of a Syracuse machine company, contended that profit-sharing plans, when combined with other evidence of "sincere appreciation and respect" for the worker, "will go farther in establishing his inherent identity with free enterprise,.. than anything we merely preach about."
While profit-sharing plans attracted new interest, private benefit programs were far more significant and far-reaching. In part, offering benefits was an ingredient of a broader corporate strategy within primary sector firms to stabilize tight labor markets through changes in personnel policy. 5 But they also served as weapons in the battle to undermine worker allegiance to unions and reliance on public sector welfare programs.
Organized labor, of course, contested business's claim for credit in the massive growth in private sector benefits. Unions, in fact, had turned to private benefits only after their failure to expand the welfare state to include such reforms as national health insurance. Then, most employers resisted union demands, fearful of the cost and the loss of managerial prerogatives. Business leaders charged that union-negotiated plans tended to "glorify the union at the expense of the employer," throwing the "obligation entirely on the one, the credit on the other." Instead, employers wanted the goodwill generated from voluntarily provided benefits and the freedom to administer such programs independently of unions. Several companies even tried to preempt union demands or government involvement by immediately instituting employee benefit plans. However, union militancy and NLRB insistence that benefits were subject to collective bargaining forced companies to deal with union demands on these issues.
Forced to concede to union demands, unionized firms tried to claim credit for the new benefit policies. In 1950, General Motors president C. E. Wilson contended that employers had been attempting to improve wages, working conditions, and benefits. He complained about what he believed was the false impression that improvements for workers "are brought about only by a union beating an employer over the head." Nonunion firms had an equally large stake in ensuring that benefits came willingly and without outside prodding. Both union and large nonunion firms came to believe that benefits, if properly handled, could "be turned into investments that bring a rich return in the form of a more efficient, more cooperative, and more stable work force."
To assure the best return, the National Association of Manufacturers advised "a continual selling job of how well the employee is being treated." Employers used their developing communication channels, including booklets, movies, letters and personal conferences, to disclose the "hidden" value of the company's fringe benefit pack-age. Especially useful were individual stories demonstrating corporate concern. In August 1950, for example, Allis-Chalmers pointed to the experience of employee Steve Kalan. The company helped him rebuild his home after it was destroyed by fire. Allis-Chalmers, which was in the midst of a battle with UAW Local 248, trumpeted Kaian's observation that "I found out who my real friends are at a time like this." He advised, "be 100% with the management and they will be with you. "101
Like profit sharing, then, private welfare plans carried a political message. To business leaders, the free enterprise system adequately met security needs, making unnecessary any expansion of the welfare state. Standard Oil executive J. W. Myers believed that private social security systems provided important means by which employers could reach their workers and "create a better understanding of how they may share in the fruits of private capitalism by each becoming a capitalist and having a stake in our economic system."
Less costly forms of welfarism complemented employer efforts to build company consciousness. In 1949, a survey of new plants by the business journal, Factory Management and Maintenance, found progressive managers committed to a good physical environment, including gardens, air conditioning, escalators, and x-ray rooms. Minor changes, like improving lighting, and maintaining a decorous plant exterior, not only increased productivity but stimulated feelings of pride toward the plant and the company. Similarly, nice touches, like coffee breaks, plant nurses, financial counseling, holiday parties, and clubs for retirees enabled companies to assert that they treated workers like family; families, unlike the state, had a responsibility for caring for their own.103
A more pervasive link to earlier welfare capitalism was industrial recreation. Management's positive experience with recreation during the war led to a tremendous expansion of corporate-sponsored leisure activities in the 1950s.104 In 1953, thirty thousand firms spent $800 million on recreation, a 50 percent increase over the previous five years. The National Industrial Recreation Association, which jumped from eleven founding members in 1941 to over nine hundred in 1957, estimated that industry spent more money on sports equipment than all the schools in the country combined.105
By the mid-1950s, industrial recreation had become such an important part of industrial relations programs that it was a business in itself. The Industrial Recreation Company of New York planned, coordinated, and packaged programs for such corporations as General Electric and Lever Brothers, while companies set out to convince workers that recreation did not simply mean "getting exhausted on your own time." Despite the growing competition from commercialized leisure, large numbers of workers took part in the recreation program; 94 percent of 3M's fifty-nine hundred St. Paul employees, for instance, participated in company classes, picnics, clubs, athletics, carnivals, and musical events. A 1949 Factory survey found that 75 percent of both union and nonunion workers approved of industrial recreation.106
Recreation addressed many of the same problems as human relations, and many company executives believed that it, too, would give alienated workers the individual recognition and sense of achievement lacking on the job. At the same time, it promoted the teamwork essential to industrial success. In 1952, General Motors personnel director W. J. Mahoney repeated a truism of the industrial recreation movement when he asserted that "employees who can play well together can work well together, too." As in the case of other welfare programs, advocates foresaw recreation paying off in increased productivity, resulting from improved morale and efficiency, and reduced fatigue, absenteeism, and turnover.107
Perhaps, more importantly, recreation was a crucial component in the effort to forestall or undermine unionism. Large nonunion firms ’like Eastman Kodak, Du Pont, and Scott Paper combined recreation with systematic welfare programs that included pensions, vacations, and insurance to successfully combat organized labor. Small paternalistic firms openly boasted that their picnics, parties, and clubs helped create a "nice, friendly attitude" that kept out union organizers.108 In unionized firms, where organized labor competed with employers for credit for the implementation of benefits, employers hoped recreation would offset organized labor's influence. It helped give workers a new group identity that stemmed from the enterprise alone. Thus, after the war, new recreation programs anchored Ford's, International Harvester's, and Allis-Chalmers' efforts to win back the allegiance of their workers after more than a decade of bitter conflict.109
Large numbers of business leaders felt that recreation was a crucial means of breaking down social barriers that were often exploited by unions. A. H. Spinner, director of employee activities at Armstrong Cork Company, found that recreational activities promoted a company rather than a class orientation. "Class consciousness," he contended, "fades out of the picture when people are engaged in the pursuit of common interests."110 Employers felt that corporate-sponsored leisure time also improved loyalty to the firm. In 1951, the personnel director of one firm reported to Factory that during a recent strike the firm reopened the plant to workers willing to cross the picket line. It discovered that while only 30 percent of plant workers regularly participated in the recreation program, over 60 percent of the strike-breakers were active in the company-sponsored activities. The personnel director justified recreation expenses this way: "We certainly don't consider recreation programs as strikebreaking tools ... and don't feel recreation programs make company 'stooges' either. Its just that those who are active in recreation programs seem to be the employees who are mostly likely to stand on their own feet and rely on their own judgement."111
Recreation meshed with another corporate welfare goal of integrating families into the company. Historians, of turn-of-the-century welfarism, have explored the importance of families in shaping attitudes toward work, but the continuing significance of the relationship between the family and the workplace has been largely ignored.112 Yet, in 1950, a business newsletter pointed out that "the family is the major influence in determining the course of any member of the group—including the worker." It advised that the employer who "realizes this fact, and works with it, will reap the long run benefit of a kinder feeling toward the company."113
Following this advice, many postwar employers reached out to families in a variety of ways. They sent letters and company publications home, opened recreation centers to workers' relatives, and built company parks to make the company a social center for workers' families. Particularly through mass activities, like summer picnics, or Christmas parties, managers attempted to bring the entire company together, including executives, supervisors, workers, and families, as a way of creating feelings of interdependence. Two such mass gatherings attracted sixty thousand Goodyear employees and families to a 1957 picnic and forty thousand workers and family members to the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation's free circus. Similarly, General Motor' 1949 preview of its new auto line for the GM family brought out fifty-three thousand people. 114 Joseph Losito gave General Motors the kind of endorsement it expected for its efforts when he stated, "my family looks forward to the BLC pic-nics and shows each year—we haven t missed a performance yet.
After World War II, companies increasingly utilized open houses, plant tours, and family days to personalize the factory and to teach more explicit economic and political messages to relatives. In 1948, the Burroughs Adding Machine Company's 133 branches held a series of Family Nights, which provided information on the company's products and included talks by company officials. Burroughs also presented a company-made film, showing the American enterprise system in action and explaining how profits were good for business and the public. In 1952, those touring the Foote Brothers Gear and Machine Corporation of Chicago "saw what dad did at the plant, the machine he operated and what he made. They shook hands with his foreman, his supervisor, union steward, and other fellow workers." Other companies used family factory tours to display their human relations programs, excellent working conditions, and many bene-fits to employee relatives.
Direct contact with workers' families, companies felt, could enhance the corporate message and tighten employee identification with the firm. The Crucible Steel Company of America posted weekly safety slogans and phoned the homes of employees during work hours. Family members who could recite the slogan won a five-dollar prize. The company found that the "wives and children are flattered when the call comes to them... The company, once just a cold, impersonal name, is now a neighbor who calls on the telephone." Even vacations provided opportunities to promote family identification with the company. During the mid-fifties, Caterpillar and 3M employees pasted stickers with company slogans on their cars and luggage to enable traveling workers to recognize fellow employees. 118
Firms tried to convince employees that the company took a human interest in their families. During the Korean War, Victor Adding Machine of Chicago sent corsages on Mothers Day to the mothers of fifty employees serving in the armed forces. The card read, "If your son were home, we know he would personally bring your favorite flowers. However, in his absence, please accept this token as a remembrance of him on Mothers Day." Other gestures targeted children; the General Electric recreation department in Schenectady ran a babysitting service to help harried parents. Firms often sent presents and cards to acknowledge new arrivals. The Ferro Corporation of Cleveland gave a sterling silver teething ring engraved with the baby's date, time, and weight at birth, while Timken Roller Bearing sent banks containing ten dimes "to start your youngster's first sav-ings account. Other firms began providing more substantial help through the establishment of college scholarship funds for employee children.
Increasingly, employers developed recreational programs specifically for workers' children, both to engender workers' loyalty and to develop a relationship with potential employees. IBM and Eastman Kodak, among others, set up children's clubs and provided arts and crafts classes, while such firms as Caterpillar, Goodyear, and North American Aviation established instruction in various sports. Special summer events brought children to plants throughout the country. In 1948, the first Ford Rouge day camp, which included a plant tour, attracted eight hundred children and six years later attendance had increased to over four thousand. Ford found the program "effective because it reaches into the home." Thousands of 3M and Timken Roller Bearing employees also brought their sons and daughters to work for day-long programs highlighted by a visit to the department where "Dad or Mom" works and the presentation of a shirt with the company emblem. To ensure attendance, the Timken personnel office sent a list of children's names, generated through their records, to foremen, who notified parents of the invitation to camp. In 1954, the Industrial Sports and Recreation Journal observed that children who participated in corporate-sponsored activities upon reaching adulthood would surely "look upon the industry which has given them some of the best sports and recreational years of their life with a warmth and respect no company can buy.
Spouses, particularly wives, remained the principal focus of company welfarism, however. In 1946, Whiting Williams wrote an article entitled "Who's Got Momma's Ear?" warning that labor leaders were giving special attention to selling wives on the importance of union membership. He contended that unions understood that wives were "a silent but important partner in all industrial relationships." Conversely, a 1951 survey of industrial workers' wives in Cleveland found that 62 percent of wives opposed strikes. Moreover, the more women knew about the company, the more they thought along management lines. However, the survey warned that where unions filled the gaps in company communication with the home, women tend-ed to influence husbands along union rather than company lines.
These observations powerfully influenced employers to court the "invisible'' employee. In 1950, Quotes Ending, a newsletter for company editors, noted increasing use of features and news stories directed solely to the home, mainly at women. Editors believed that special pages with household hints and recipes attracted female readers to the company paper. Similarly, letters addressed to the spouse explained the firm's position during contract negotiations and attempted to enlist mom in the drive for quality, safety, and productivity. In 1953, convinced that enthusiasm for the company could never be maintained "unless they are shared and nurtured by the distaff public," International Harvester invited the wives or female relatives of seventy thousand workers to a plant tour, lunch, and a meeting with top executives. The tour emphasized International Harvester's benefit program and taught that increased production meant progress and security for all. 126
Companies gave wives special recognition for their "loyalty and devotion" to the firm. Armco Steel Corporation and Victor Adding Machine presented wives of long-term employees with gold broaches. With suggestion awards worth over $1,000, Westinghouse Corporation also gave the employee's spouse a gift. In 1951, the general manager of a small paternalistic firm in Denver explained why his company sent birthday cards and bouquets to employee wives, notified them of changes in hours, and handed them the profit-sharing checks at the company's annual Christmas party: "A man's wife has a powerful influence over her husband's reaction to his job and his company... if you do it properly, you can mold that influence so it does you and the employee a lot of good." 7
In times of crisis, some employers tried to draw on the reservoir of goodwill developed through their attention to workers' wives. "You would be surprised," contended Timken Roller Bearing executive R. L. Frederick "at the pressure that a woman can place upon her husband if he is considering going out on strike for half a cent an hour, or vested right... Mrs. Employee will often make it clear that she doesn't care for that." To overcome a worker slowdown in 1949, the
Lionel Company sent home a series of cartoons called "Talking it Over with the Wife." The cartoons stated that if husbands were making less, they probably were "fighting the rate/' which had been agreed upon with the union. According to Forbes, Lionel "did not underestimate the power of a woman. In a few weeks the laggards were back in stride, and production has hummed ever since."
Profit sharing, benefits, recreation, and the integration of the family into the firm, these were the building blocks of the corporate attempt to build company consciousness. These mechanisms often blended with those associated with human relations in linking workers to the company and the free enterprise system. A core of American industry, led by firms like IBM, Du Pont, Sears, and Endicott Johnson, relied on human relations and welfarism to maintain their nonunion status. But, company consciousness cannot be dismissed as a strategy pursued only by the nonunion sector. Firms openly fighting with their unions, such as General Electric and Timken Roller Bearing, as well as those that had supposedly reached an accord— General Motors for one—utilized company consciousness to confine the political and economic horizons of both organized labor and liberal proponents of the welfare state.
Notes
1. Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 53, 63-69.
2. John W. Hill, "Industry's Iron Curtain," PRI2 (Nov. 1946): 3.
3. "Basic Elements of a Free, Dynamic Society—Part I, A Round Table Discussion Sponsored by the Advertising Council, Inc." HBR 29 (1951): 57.
4. On postwar managerial labor strategy, see Howell John Harris, The Right
to Manage: Industrial Relations Polices of American Business in the 1940's (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), passim.
5. Ibid., chap. 5; David Brody, Work in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 173-211.
6. On the accord, see, among others, Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class, (London: Verso, 1986), p. 104; David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich trace the formation of an accord featuring union accommodation with management but acknowledge that the postwar labor management system reflected a compromise between labor and capital. Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 170-89, esp. 189. Sociologist William Foote Whyte has observed that in the 1940s and 1950s the "prevailing relationships between unions and management were sharply adversarial/' "From
Human to Organizational Behavior: Reflections on the Changing Scene/' ILRR 40 Guly 1987): 49. Similarly, Thomas A. Kochan, Harry C. Katz, and Robert B. McKersie argue that management never accepted unions as legitimate partners and that "deep-seated resistance towards unions" historically has been "embedded in the belief system of managers." They contend that an understanding of the post-1960 decline in union membership and collective bargaining coverage requires "a reconceptualization of managerial strategies, structures, and policies that were unfolding, often quietly" during the fifties and sixties. The Transformation of Industrial Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 3-38.
7. Edward T. Cheyfitz, "Show-Down Decade Ahead" (Address before the fifty-fourth annual Congress of American Industries), Hagley Library, Wilmington, Delaware. Unlike Brody and Lichtenstein, who emphasize the extent to which management successfully constrained union power, Tolliday and Zeitlin contend that the centralized and contractual collective bargaining that developed during the postwar limited management's freedom of action to a significant degree. Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Shop Floor Bargaining, Contract Unionism, and Job Control," in On the Line: Essays in the History of Auto Work, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein and Stephen Meyer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 229-36, esp. 235.
8. James W. Kuhn, Bargaining in Grievance Settlement: The Power of Industrial Work Groups (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
9. Harris, The Right to Manage, pp. 135-36; Meyer Kestenbaum, "The Human Element in Productivity," AMA Personnel Series No. 172 (1948), pp. 28-33; Robert Wood Johnson, "Human Relations in Modern Business," HHR 27 (Sept. 1949): 533-34.
10. Charles R. Hook, Jr., "Profits and People: The Personnel Function of Management," AMA Personnel Series No. 132 (1950), p. 7.
11. Johnson, "Human Relations in Modern Business," p. 533.
12. Ibid., p. 533.
13. Lois R. Dean, "Union Activity and Dual Loyalty," ILRR 7 (July 1954): 526-36.
14. William H. Ruffin, "Management and Government in Human Relations" (Address before the Blue Ridge Conference of Southern Industrial Executives, July 18, 1951), Accession 1412, NAM, Industrial Relations Department Papers, Box 12 (hereafter Ace. 1412, NAM, Box 12).
15. E. Wright Bakke, "Labor and Management Look Ahead," AMA Personnel Series No. 98 (1946), p. 11.
16. Wallace F. Bennett, "The Bridge" (Address before a Regional Meeting of the Denver Rotary Club, the Manufacturers Association of Colorado and the NAM, June 2, 1949), Accession 1411, NAM, Series I, Box 5 (hereafter Ace. 1411, NAM 1/5).
17. Bennett, "The Bridge"; "Employee Loyalty—How and When," Communicator, June 28, 1956, reprint in Ace. 1412, NAM, Box 14; Hill, "Industry's Iron Curtain," p. 5.
18. Martin Dodge, "Does Management Get Its Message Across to Employ-
ees?" AMA Personnel Series 102 (1946), p. 4; "Job of Communications/' Stet, Aug. 1947, p. 5.
19. Solomon Barkin# "A Trade Unionist Appraises Management Personnel Philosophy," HBR 28 (Sept. 1950): 59-64.
20. Earl Bunting, "The Employee as an Individual" (Address before the Twentieth NAM Institute on Industrial Relations, Oct. 30, 1950), pamphlet (New York, n.d.), pp. 7-9.
21. Hill, "Industry's Iron Curtain," pp. 3-4; "Trends in Employee Thinking on Simple Economics," POJ1 8 (Feb. 1950): 5. See also Harris, The Right to Manage, pp. 184-89, for more extensive discussion of the business interpretation and concern over worker attitudes after the war.
22. Hugh L. Rusch, "Management's Obligation to Disseminate Economic Facts," in Proceedings of Thirty-Second Silver Bay Conference on Human Relations in Industry, July 19-23, 19S0 (New York, 1950), pp. 19-20.
23. Henry Ford "Obligation of Business Management" (Address before the Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Chamber Commerce of the United States, Apr. 30, 1947), Box 29, AOF 1, LMDC.
24. Rusch, "Management's Obligation to Disseminate Economic Facts," p. 20; M&F quoted in S. Avery Raube, "Nonfinancial Incentives," MRec 8 (Dec. 1946): 395.
25. Guy B. Arthur, Jr., "The Status of Personnel Administration in Management," AMA Personnel Series 102 (1946), pp. 32-34.
26. Austin S. Ingleheart, "Management Must Sell Itself," FMM 106 (Sept. 1948): 212.
27. M. J. Murphy, "Why Unions Cry 'Speed-Up'—and How Management Can Answer," FMM 107 0uly 1949): 122-25; M. J. Murphy, "Must Big Unionism Mean Labor Monopoly?" FMM 107 (Oct. 1949): 125-28.
28. Victor RIesel, "Remarks" at the 55th Annual Congress of American Industry, Dec. 6, 1960, NAM Press Releases, Neilson Library, Smith College.
29. James J. Nance, "Top Management Views the Job Ahead In Industrial Relations," AMA Personnel Series No. 124 (1949), pp. 32-34; J. M. Gabatese, "What Labor Did in the Election—and What It Will Do," FMM 107 Can. 1949): 134-37.
30. In 1961, Textile Research Director Solomon Barkin tried to explain the decline in the growth of unionism, contending that one of the most serious obstacles was "the unwillingness of employers to accept unions and collective bargaining as an Integral part of the industrial system." He contended that important segments of the business community fought unions through a theory of personnel management designed to build allegiance among employees to their companies. Solomon Barkin, The Decline of the Labor Movement and What Can Be Done About It (Santa Barbara, Calf.: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1961), pp. 5-20, 39-40.
31. William H. Ruffin, "Management and Government in Human Relations."
32. There is a vast contemporary literature on the origins and development of human relations. Among the classic descriptions is Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1960). For a more recent discussion, see Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiment (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 1991).
33. A. H. Maslow, "A Theory of Human Motivation/' Psychological Review 50 (Sept. 1943): 370-96; Keith Davis, Human Relations in Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957), pp. 38-44.
34. Baritz, The Servants of Power, pp. 202-3; Henry A. Landsberger, Haw-{home Revisited: Management and the Worker, Its Critics, and Developments in Human Relations in Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 30-43.
35. Thomas G. Spates, "The Competition for Leadership in a Welfare Economy" (Address Before the Midwinter Personnel conference of the American Management Association, Chicago, Illinois, Feb. 15, 1949), Ace. 1412, NAM, Box 13.
36. Welfare workers during the Progressive Era had discussed the problem of worker alienation. Also there were early efforts at foreman training during World War I. Sanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 99-104, 258-59, 269-73; Baritz, The Servants of Power, pp. 139-66.
37. Baritz, The Servants of Power, p. 169; Davis, Human Relations in Business, pp. 7-8.
38. Henry Ford II, "The Challenge of Human Engineering," pamphlet c. 1946 in Box 55, AOF 1, LMDC.
39. Fowler McCormick, "American Business and Its Human Relations," AMA Personnel Series No. 106 (1947), p. 3.
40. Among firms formally adopting systematic human relations programs on the heels of the postwar strike wave were the George D. Roper Company, Ford Motor, General Electric, ALCOA, Steel Improvement and Forge Company, Borg-Warner Company, Monsanto Chemical Company, and International Harvester. "Human Relations: A New Art Brings a Revolution to Industry," Time, Apr. 14, 1952, p. 96; Cloud Wampler to H. M. Dirks, June 28, 1948, Box 27, AOF I, LMDC; "Communication Methods at Carrier," MRec 10 (Sept. 1948): 441-43.
41. Leo Teplow, "It's the Individual Who Counts" (Speech delivered before the Toledo Foreman's Club, Dec. 21, 1949), Ace. 1412, NAM, Box 13.
42. For a more extensive treatment of the changing role of foremen, see Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, chaps. 1, 5, 6, 7, and 8; Harris, The Right to Manage, pp. 63-69, 74-87, 143-48, 162-67, 171-74; Nelson Lichtenstein, "The Man in the Middle': A Social History of Automobile Industry Foreman," in On the Line: Essays in the History of Auto Work, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein and Stephen Meyer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 153-89.
43. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, pp. 269-72; Corning White, "Humanizing Management," P) 30 (Oct. 1951): 168-72; Lukens Steel Company, "Industrial Relations Division Annual Progress Report for the 1950 Fiscal Year and Forecast of Special Projects for the 1951 Year," Jan. 15, 1951, Box 31,
AOF III, LDMC. For more references on the origins and development of a softer supervisory style see works cited by Harris, The Right to Manage, pp. 267-68; Lemuel R. Boulware, "How Big is Our Job?" AMA Personnel Series No. 116 (1948), pp. 39-41; Supervisor's Guide to General Electric fob Information, pamphlet (1947), Box 57, AOF 1, LMDC; National Association of Manufacturers, "Improving Human Relations in Industry," p. 10, HML.
44. Baritz, Servants of Power, pp. 186-88; James C. Worthy, "Democratic Principles in Business Management," MRec 14 (Mar. 1949): 19; William Foote Whyte, "From Human Relations," p. 492.
45. Lewis Corey, "Human Relations Minus Unionism," L&N Spring, 1950, p. 50; William B. Wolf, The Management of Personnel (Belmont, Calf.: Wad-sworth Publishing, 1961), pp. 248; "Suggestions Are Good For the System," AB, July 1949, p. 28; "The Suggestion Box: Treasure Chest for Industry," Time, Nov. 26, 1956.
46. For worker reaction to the suggestion system at Remington Rand, see Marc Steven Kolopsky, "Remington Rand Workers in the Tonawandas of Western New York, 1927-1956: A History of the Mohawk Valley Formula" (Ph.D. diss., University of New York, Buffalo, 1986); E. W. Hamlin, "Waste Reduction Campaign Hits Million-Dollar Jackpot," FMM 107 (May 1949): 102-3; "Silver Dollars for Quality," FMM 114 (Sept 1956): 140.
47. A. L. Chapman, "Use Showmanship to Get Better Plant Performance," FMM 110 (Feb. 1952): 84-89.
48. "Presentation of Employee Awards," pamphlet, 1950, Box 56, AOF I, LMDC; "Industry Honors Its Best," MRec 14 (June 1952): 225-32.
49. "'Happy Birthday'—from the Company," MRec 16 (Jan. 1954): 3-11, 34-35, esp. 3.
50. "Making a Production of the Service Club Dinner," MRec 14 (Mar. 1952): 96; "How to Make Service Awards Mean More," FMM 108 (Dec. 1950): 108.
51. "How One Company Fits Women to Jobs," FMM 115 (Feb. 1957): 125; Francis M. Bogert, "Keeping the Gals Happy," PJ 28 (Apr. 1950): 412-13; PRN, Mar. 3, 1952; June 13, 1955; "Planning a Company Picnic?" MRec 13 (Sept. 1951): 132.
52. Anna M. Rosenberg, "A New Industrial Citizenship for America's Workers," FMM 106 (Aug. 1948): 111-12; Harris, The Right to Manage pp. 189-92.
53. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, p. 253.
54. Even before the passage of Taft-Hartley, the NLRB and the courts had begun to broaden the parameters of allowable employer speech. Taft-Hartley codified this trend. "How Practical Personnel Men Think the Labor Law Will Work," FMM 105 (August 1947): 91; "Economic 'Facts of Life' for Your Workers," Ml 14 (Dec. 15, 1947): 40.
55. Harold Hawkey, Memo, "Management's Hottest Problem," Apr. 7, 1952, Ace. 1411, NAM |/11; Ira Mosher, "Producing for Freedom" (Address before the 55th Annual Congress of American Industry, Dec. 6, 1950), NAM Press Release, Neilson Library, Smith College; the Quarterly Reports of the NAM Employee Relations Division trace the organization's involvement in the drive
to promote employee communications, Ace. 1411, NAM 1/13, Carroll E. French, "Evaluation of Communication Methods" (Address before Estes Park Conference on Human Relations In Industry, July 14, 1950), Ace. 1412, NAM, Box 6.
56. Walter Petravage, "The Chamber of Commerce Does Something about It!" PR/, Nov. 1950, pp. 6-8. The Chamber of Chamber of Commerce files at the LMDC contain programs of "Explaining Your Business Seminars" conducted by the CCUS, Box 30, AOF 1, LMDC; "How to Be Understood," Stet, Nov. 1956, pp. 1-4.
57. ERLIC, Communications and the Issues of Our Times, pamphlet, 1958, ERLIC, Purposeful Communication with Your Employees, pamphlet, n.d., both in Box 51, AOF I, LMDC.
58. John S. Bugas, "Labor Relations and Productivity," AMA Personnel Series No. 112 (1947), p. 57; William B. Given "Freedom to Manage" (Address before the American Management Association meeting in Chicago, Nov. 15, 1946), pamphlet, Box 4, AOF I, LMDC; Ivan L. Willis, "Basic Principles for Effective Communications," AM 15 (Sept. 1950): 9.
59. Steinkraus quoted in "Management's Quid Pro Quo," MRec 16 (Feb. 1954): 62.
60. "GM's New 'Booklet Cafeterias' Open Information Channel Between Top Management and Employees," AB, Jan. 1950, p. 53; "Information Racks: A New Communications Medium," National Industrial Conference Board Conference Report No. 125 (New York, 1952); New York Tribune, Nov 8, 1959.
61. See Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 62-65, for origins of the employee magazine; Robert Newcomb, "Modern Administration of Employee Publications," AMA Personnel Series No. 108 (1947), pp. 25-29; "Survey Shows Big Gains," Stet, Jan. 1952, pp. 4-5; WS], Oct. 23, 1962.
62. Harris, The Right to Manage, p. 191; "Many Private Opinions," Stet, Oct. 1946, pp. 1-4; "Help 'em Like the Job," Stet, May 1952, pp. 4-5.
63. Harris, The Right to Manage, p. 191; "For New Understanding," Stet, Feb. 1950, pp. 1-4; A-C Views, June 4, 1949; Pamphlets distributed by the American Steel & Wire Co. Rack Service ca. 1950 in Box 11, AOF IV, LMDC; "How A S & W Does It," Stet, Apr. 1950, pp. 2-3.
64. New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 8, 1959; John Cameron Aspley and Eugene Whitmore, The Handbook of Industrial Relations (Chicago: Dartnell, 1952), pp. 825-45.
65. "How to Make the Communications Dollar Work Harder," POI1 14 (1956): 4.
66. James M. Black, "How to Write Better Letters to Employees," FMM 111 (Sept. 1953): 84-89; Weils Norris, "Keeping 185,000 Ford Employees Informed," AB, June 1954, pp. 16-17, 44; "The Battle for Men's Minds," Explaining Your Business, May 1953.
67. "AFT President Records Message for Employees," AB, July 1948, p. 59; "Sure-Fire Way to Get Employees to Listen to Your Company Story," FMM 114 (Dec. 1956): 124-25.
68. "New Qunch Game Keeps Employees Informed about Company Products and People," AB, Sept. 1948, p. 59.
69. For a more extensive discussion of attitude surveys, see Baritz, The Servants of Power, pp. 149-55; Sanford M. Jacoby, "Employee Attitude Testing at Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1938-1960," Business History Review 60 (Winter 1986): 602-32; "New Morale Meter Measures Employee Attitudes," AB, Apr. 1952, p. 56.
70. "How to Make the Communications Dollar Work Harder," POII 14 (1956): 8; M. J. Murphy, " A Little Paternalism Makes a Lot of Sense," FMM 108 (Apr. 1950): 55; "Lunch with the Bosses," FMM 111 (July 1953): 138. The Thompson Products Records provide a good record of the numerous meetings held by the firm. See, for example, Friendly Forum, June 21, 1946, Oct. 11, 1946, Case 15, Thompson Products Company Records, Baker Library, Harvard University, Boston, Mass.
71. "Two Way Communication Builds Employee Co-operation," AB, July 1959, pp. 34-35.
72. Robert Newcomb and Marg Sammons, "Plant Tours for Employees," M&F 52 (fan. 1953): 102-4, esp. 104; "Let 'em Fly in the Finished Product," FMM, 108 (Apr. 1950): 83.
73. "Impact of Taxes is Revealed in Unusual Picture," AB, Jan. 1954, p. 40.
74. The following year Avco, GE, International Harvester, Quaker Oats, and Sears sponsored a similar campaign entitled IGHUGS (I'm Gonna Howl
'bout Unnecessary Government Spending); PRN, Apr. 20, 1953, Feb. 8, 1954; "Quaker Oats Fights High Taxes with 'Ighat' Plan," AB, Apr. 1953, p. 56.
75. Several studies published during the fifties examined the development and content of various in-plant economic education programs. See Blaine M. Cooke, "Economic Education in Industry" (Ph. D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1954); Richard Stanton Rimanoczy, Adult Economic Education in Industry (New York: Lincoln Foundation, 1954). All Westinghouse employees underwent two separate programs of economic education between 1951 and 1953; "Westinghouse Promotes American Way in Program," AB, Oct. 1951, p. 64; PRN, Jan 23, 1953; "Highlights of the General Electric Economic Education Program," pamphlet, n.d., Box C8, Ace. 1631, AISI; Fred G. Clark to J. Howard Pew, Sept. 20,1951, Box 213, Pew Papers; Swift Uses 'Slapboard' Talks for Dramatic Emphasis," AB, Jan. 1950, p. 54; William H. Stevenson, "Economic Education for Employees," HBR 29 (Jan 1951): 75.
76. The records of the Education Department of the NAM trace the development, spread, and content of the HOBSO program, Ace. 1411, NAM 1/ 62-70, for a listing of firms involved in HOBSO see Box 67; NAM News, Sept. 9, 1950, Jan. 6, 1951.
77. "In Our Hands—Workers Talk Economics," Ml 22 (July 15, 1951): 41-45; Stevenson," Economic Education for Employees," p. 77; Latrobe Bulletin, Apr. 10, 1951; James M. Underwood, "A Program of Community Economic Education" (pamphlet), (c. 19S1), Box C-8, AISI.
78. For a good analysis of the content of the major programs, see Cooke,
"Economic Education in Industry"; H. K. Breckenridge, "Freedom or Socialized Industry?" PI 30 (Mar. 1952): 376-79, esp. 377; "Comments Concerning 'HOBSO' Program" (Du Pont Company) Ace. 1411, NAM 1/64.