In 1959, labor journalist Bert Cochran observed that "the businessman's intellectual reconquest of America" after World War II was "a more remarkable achievement than was his reassertion of long exercised power after World War I."1 In 1945, business faced an aggressive labor movement that sought to reassert New Deal liberalism. Unions called for full employment, social planning, and the expansion of the welfare state, essentially a reorientation of American society orchestrated through the continued growth of labor and state power.
The business community had a different agenda. It sought not only to recast the political economy of postwar America but also to reshape the ideas, images, and attitudes through which Americans understood their world. Employers hoped to restore the public's allegiance to an individualistic ethos that had been shaken by the travails of the Depression. They asserted that economic decisions should be made in corporate board rooms not in legislative committee chambers. Prosperity, they argued, would be achieved best through reliance on individual initiative and the natural harmony of workers and managers that business saw as inherent in the free enterprise system. According to many industrialists, a socially responsible capitalism, relying on increases in productivity and economic growth rather than on the redistribution of income, would solve society's problems and bring the good life to all.
These ideas made up a part of the conservative ideology often associated with the 1950s. This work contends that this conservatism was politically constructed and was in large part the result of the business community's "intellectual reconquest" of America. It had its origins in a variety of campaigns conducted by American business (and consistently in opposition to labor) to shape the public's political, social, and economic ideas; and particularly, to again associate the American way with the ethic of competitive individualism. The business community had two primary goals. First, it hoped to destroy or discredit the ideological underpinnings of New Deal liberalism. Second, it wanted to undermine the legitimacy and power of organized labor. Unions posed a significant challenge not only in the shop but in the political realm as the backbone of the Democratic party coalition. Industrialists would accomplish these goals through campaigns to sell Americans on the virtues of individualism as opposed to collectivism, freedom as opposed to state control, and on the cen-trality of the free enterprise system to the American way of life.
The most obvious efforts to shape ideology and to create a more conservative political climate took place at the national level. National 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 sell business and capitalism. Yet, even as they conducted these national mass media campaigns, business leaders recognized the limitations of relying on this strategy alone. They believed that employers needed an even more direct connection with the public. The most logical place to begin was within the plant with their own workers serving as a captive audience. Even employers who recognized unions believed that organized labor fundamentally challenged their ability to shape worker attitudes and provide political leadership. Thus, moderate, as well as conservative, business leaders sought to increase worker productivity and undermine union power by creating a separate company identity or company consciousness among their employees. To win workers' allegiance, managers in a wide range of firms reshaped their personnel policies by blending the insights of human relations with the techniques of welfare capitalism. Economic education campaigns sought to build worker allegiance to the firm and to the American economic system while welfarism provided tangible evidence of employer concern for workers. Thus, expanding the community of interests beyond the immediate confines of the factory to encompass the worker's leisure and home life.
Fearing for lost authority beyond their factory gates, employers also instituted sophisticated community relations programs that both promoted the free enterprise system and built goodwill for individual firms. In January 1960, National Industrial Conference Board President John S. Sinclair concluded that as a result of these efforts business had probably "never enjoyed a more favorable climate of public opinion." In part, he admitted, this mellowing of public attitudes toward business was the result of continuing prosperity. Equally important in "the gradual recession of distrust" was industry's willingness to help alleviate social problems, particularly in the fields of health and education and its "efforts to assume the role of a good neighbor in the communities in which it operates."2
Organized labor also sought to shape worker consciousness, attempting to compete for worker loyalty and public sympathy both within the factory and in the community. 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 such important institutions as the Community Chests. Attempting to resist the business community's ideological onslaught, organized labor 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. Unions sought to associate the American way with the cause of social justice and economic equality rather than individualism.
The labor movement could never match the resources available to the leaders of American business. As a result, the political and cultural landscape of the postwar era was increasingly dominated by the images and ideas produced by a mobilized business leadership. This indeed marked "the businessman's intellectual reconquest of America." How far this reconquest went, how deeply rooted it was, remains unclear. We know what business leaders wanted workers and other Americans to believe. Moreover, we know that the images and ideas of business were pervasive, filling much of America's cultural space with a series of selectively distorted symbols that made it difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to discover and articulate competing visions of the American polity. To this degree, at least, the "businessman's intellectual reconquest of America" succeeded.
Admittedly, we know much less about what the public actually believed, for even the most sophisticated polls do not begin to plumb the private reservoirs of dissent and disengagement that characterized American popular culture. Nevertheless, the polls do suggest a shift during the fifties from the more "collectivist values" of the thirties to the older value system of individualism. The sociologist Seymour Lipset suggests that this drift back to an individualistic ethos, which labeled unions as suspect because of their collective character, served as an important element in the gradual decline of organized labor.3
Beyond the capital-labor struggle, how does this work help us better understand the post-World War II period. This study suggests that the common characterization of the fifties as an age of consensus needs to be rethought. Many historians depict this consensus as emerging in an almost sweeping, determistic process from broad historical forces, including the "exhaustion of ideology" in the wake of two decades of depression and war, the impact of the cold war and McCarthyism, and the spread of consumerism and mass culture. All of this supposedly left a complacent, quiescent society with those on the left and right drifting toward the "broad political center."4 This study argues that this apparent consensus was neither as simple nor as complete as these accounts suggest. The forces of conservatism were not drawn into this "broad political center" but maintained their opposition to the changes unleashed by the New Deal. Beneath an apparent calm surface, powerful conservative opposition to New Deal liberalism never really disappeared, for even in its attenuated state conservatives still found liberalism threatening. It was the continuing attraction of liberalism and organized labor that was behind the ideological assault described in this book. This assault contributed to the containment of liberalism, the spread of domestic anticom-munism, and the checks on the growth of the welfare state in the 1950s.
How has businesses reconquest of America fared since the fifties? Obviously, the business community has continued to recognize the powerful role of ideology in shaping America's political economy. It would turn to ideology again when it found its power threatened. During the late sixties and early seventies, the probusiness environment constructed during the fifties came under siege. Social movements, including civil rights, women's rights, environmentalism, and consumer and worker protection, arose—all of which threatened to place powerful constraints on business. Legislation growing out of these movements created new regulations that cut into profit margins and corporate control over the workplace at a time when business faced growing foreign competition.5
Beginning in the mid-seventies, threatened by shrinking profits and worried about the loss of public confidence, the business community remobilized in a fashion not seen since the fifties. Again business sought to shape public opinion by reaching out to employees and the public. Economic education programs aimed at workers, teachers, and students proliferated as did institutional advertising. W. R. Grace Company's television ads, for instance, emphasized the principles of freedom and small government, and Mobil Oil began an advocacy advertising program that continues to the present time.
In 1976, the Advertising Council launched the biggest economic education project in its history, the "American Economic System" campaign, which like the Council's campaign of the late forties, sought to address public "misunderstanding" of the private enterprise system. Underpinning this wider public campaign was an effort to "lay the scholarly and theoretical groundwork for a major shift in public policy favoring business" by funding the work of "highly respected" but independent conservative scholars and conservative think tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Heritage Foundation.
Finally, the business community increased its political effectiveness with the formation of the Business Roundtable in 1973 and with the revitalization of the Chamber of Commerce. The Roundtable, composed of the chief executive officers of the nation's largest firms, became the "political arm of big business." At the same time, the Chamber of Commerce, which had emerged from the sixties a large but stagnant organization, became a vehicle for politically mobilizing small business. Key business leaders revived the Chamber, which began serving as a base for grass roots lobbying, bringing the force of large numbers to supplement the Roundtable's more elitist forms of lobbying. As was the case in the fifties, corporations began expanding on that base through the politicization of employees and stockholders. A new tactic of the seventies, made possible by changes in campaign finance laws, was the formation of business political action committees which collected large sums of money from employees and funneled the funds to probusiness politicians.6
All this effort helped create a major political shift that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan, the subsequent tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, the elimination of regulation, and the severe cutbacks in social services. The business community laid the ideological and institutional foundations for the nation's movement toward a more individualistic ethos. Because the shift in the 1980s was so striking and sweeping, it has often been portrayed as something entirely novel. But in fact, few elements in the creation of the Reagan revolution were new. Indeed, perhaps Ronald Reagan best symbolizes the continuity. Beginning in 1954, the future president of the United States spent eight years in the employment of General Electric, hosting a television program and speaking to employee and local civic group audiences as part of the company's public relations and economic education program. During that time, Reagan fine-tuned a message that he would repeat in the late seventies, warning of the threat that labor and the state posed to our "free economy."7
Thus, put in the context of businesses efforts in the immediate postwar years, Reaganism appears as the fruition of a half-century's campaign for the "intellectual reconquest of America."
Notes
1. Bert Cochran, ed., American Labor in Midpassage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959), p. 2.
2. John S. Sinclair, 'The Role of Business in Public Affairs/' Management Record 22 (Jan. 1960): 7-8.
3. Seymour M. Lipset, "North American Labor Movements: A Comparative Perspective," in Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century, ed. Lipset (San Francisco, California: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1986), pp. 421-52; David Brody, "Barriers of Individualism in the Path of American Unions," Dissent 36 (Winter 1989): 71-77.
4. J. Ronald Oakley, God's Country: America in the Fifties (New York: Dem-bner Books, 1986), p. 315.
5. Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 112-14, 128-30, Dan Clawson and Mary Ann Clawson, "Reagan or Business?: Foundations of the New Conservatism," in The Structure of Power in America: The Corporate Elite as a Ruling Class, ed. Michael Schwartz (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), pp. 202-4; Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf, Beyond the Waste Land: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), chap. 3; Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 78-83.
6. Clawson and Clawson, "Reagan or Business?" pp. 205-25; Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality, pp. 107-40; Ferguson and Rogers, Right Turn, pp. 83-92; Paul H. Weaver, "Corporations Are Defending Themselves with the Wrong Weapon." Fortune, June 1977, pp. 186-96; "Industry's Schoolhouse Clout," BW, Oct. 13, 1980, pp. 159-60; Rogene A. Buchholz, Business Environment and Public Policy: Implications for Management and Strategy Formulation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1989), 513-27; Sar A. Levitan and Martha R. Cooper, Business Lobbies: The Public Good and the Bottom Line (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
7. Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 11.
