Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America (Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 5: Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture
 
9780812224481: Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America (Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812224485 ISBN 13: 9780812224481
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Recent events—the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and efforts to increase the minimum wage, among others—have driven a tremendous surge of interest in the political power of business. Capital Gains collects some of the most innovative new work in the field. The chapters explore the influence of business on American politics in the twentieth century at the federal, state, and municipal levels. From corporate spending on city governments in the 1920s to business support for public universities in the postwar period, and from business opposition to the Vietnam War to the corporate embrace of civil rights, the contributors reveal an often surprising portrait of the nation's economic elite.

Contrary to popular mythology, business leaders have not always been libertarian or rigidly devoted to market fundamentalism. Before, during, and after the New Deal, important parts of the business world sought instead to try to shape what the state could accomplish and to make sure that government grew in ways that were favorable to them. Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, these essays highlight the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscore the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century—and today.

Contributors: Daniel Amsterdam, Brent Cebul, Jennifer Delton, Tami Friedman, Eric Hintz, Richard R. John, Pamela Walker Laird, Kim Phillips-Fein, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Eric Smith, Jason Scott Smith, Mark R. Wilson.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Richard R. John is Professor of History at Columbia University.
Kim Phillips-Fein is Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.



Richard R. John is Professor of History at Columbia University. Kim Phillips-Fein is Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

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Introduction. Adversarial Relations? Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America
Richard R. John

During the past few years, a growing popular awareness of the large wealth disparity between the many and the few has helped revive enduring questions about the relationship between business and politics in the American past. Some warn that the wealthiest Americans today have more power than ever to rig the game in their favor. Others blame the government for fostering inequality by distorting market forces. Still others deplore the current level of inequality as bad for capitalism. No longer does it seem plausible to echo the hoary platitude that "a rising tide lifts all boats." It is sometimes said that the participants in this debate misunderstand the relationship between capitalism and equality. Yet no thoughtful observer of American public life would deny that the relationship between the business elite and governmental institutions has often been adversarial, and that this relationship can be documented not only in public relations talking points and electioneering sound bites but also in the historical record. Even so, questions remain. How adversarial has this relationship been? Can it be linked to the wider developments in culture, politics, and society? And, if so, how can it best be explained?

This collection of original essays offers a fresh perspective on these and other questions that lie at the intersection of business and politics in twentieth-century America. Just as an earlier generation of historians parsed the politics of working-class people with imagination and insight, so do these historians fix the spotlight on the business leaders who dominated the nation's political economy.

The essays in this collection—all but three of which were first presented at the Hagley Museum and Library, in Wilmington, Delaware, and many of which draw on the Hagley Library's extraordinary archival holdings—explore the engagement of business leaders with governmental institutions from a distinctive angle of vision. In each essay, the relationship of business and politics is a central theme. When our authors refer to business, they are primarily concerned with firms that employ large numbers of people and with business leaders who exert substantial political power. That is, they mostly focus on the business elite. When our authors refer to politics, they are mostly interested in ideology and public policy, which they understand to embrace the enactment and implementation of laws and regulations at all levels of government: federal, state, and municipal. Unlike so much historical writing on recent American history, this collection is sensitive to politics not only in Washington but also in the state house and city hall.

Elections, legislative maneuvering, and campaign finance are, of course, also important to a full understanding of the relationship between business and politics in modern America. Yet they are not a main focus of the essays that follow. Rather, our authors consider some of the more pervasive, though often overlooked, ways in which business leaders—a large and diverse group that includes corporate executives, middle managers, independent proprietors, trade association representatives, and industry lobbyists—have shaped, and have been shaped by, the political economic rules of the game. Culture matters, but so do institutions—and our authors are mindful not only of the vital, if often elusive, power of ideology and belief, but also of the often hard-edged imperatives of business decisionmaking and political fiat.

The topics that our authors explore build on a venerable tradition of historical writing about business and politics in the American past. More than a century ago, Charles Beard famously proposed, in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), that powerful seaboard merchants had designed the federal Constitution to limit the influence of popular majorities on economic affairs. Beard's own understanding of the relationship between business and politics is more nuanced than is sometimes assumed. His landmark Rise of American Civilization (1927), for example, was suffused with an almost utopian faith in the democratic potential of the modern, high-technology corporation that, at least in his mind, fit comfortably alongside the more mordant critical realism of his Economic Interpretation.

Yet it was Beard's people-versus-the-interests dualism, rather than his technological enthusiasm, that would capture the attention of his colleagues in the interwar period. The enormous power wielded by the "captains of industry" was inherently illegitimate, or so Beard's progeny assumed, since it enabled a self-appointed elite to dominate public life in ways that precluded the possibility of a truly democratic politics. The antidemocratic implications of concentrated economic power furnished a leitmotif for Matthew Josephson's Robber Barons, a captivating 1934 potboiler written by a popular journalist during the depths of the Great Depression. To document the perversion of democratic politics by the country's late nineteenth-century empire builders, Josephson recycled a half-century of journalistic editorializing that originated not in the rural hinterland, as Josephson disingenuously claimed, but in the big-city press. More muted in tone, yet basically similar in its characterization of the "economic royalists," as Franklin D. Roosevelt termed them, was The Politics of Upheaval, an influential overview by the Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published in 1960, of a critical juncture in the New Deal.

Historians have long faulted Beard, Josephson, and Schlesinger for their almost Manichean, business-versus-democracy essentialism. Yet it should not be forgotten that this genre of historical writing—known today as the "progressive school"—drew its inspiration from a laudable critical realism that in the decades to come would lead a galaxy of talented historians to probe in greater detail—often using archival sources and typically with the benefit of insights derived from social theory—the relationships among politics, democracy, and the business elite.

The progressive historians typically assumed that business leaders were fundamentally opposed to reform, an assumption that was reinforced by their keen awareness of the magnitude of the challenge that Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democratic party confronted in the 1930s, when, in response to the Great Depression, the party backed legislation to create a new kind of "mixed economy" to increase and channel investment, rein in corporate prerogatives, strengthen labor unions, and guarantee prosperity.

The presumption that business and reform were locked in mortal combat would be challenged in the 1950s and 1960s by a constellation of post-New Deal historians that included Lee Benson, Robert H. Wiebe, Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, Ellis Hawley, James Livingston, and Martin Sklar. These historians shared the progressives' fascination with the relationship between business and politics, a commonality that is sometimes overlooked by a later generation of historiographers who drew spurious connections between their rejection of the progressives' people-versus-the-interests duality and the celebration of "consensus" by the cultural historians David Potter and Daniel Boorstin. Unlike Potter and Boorstin, these post-New Deal historians rarely identified themselves as political conservatives: in fact, several would become prominently identified in the 1960s with the antiestablishment New Left. The post-New Deal historians wrote at the high tide of postwar liberalism—an age of wide, though hardly universal, prosperity in which one-third of the nation's labor force paid union dues, and the dominant bloc in each of the major...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812224485
ISBN 13 
9780812224481
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
312
Herausgeber
John Richard R., Phillips-Fein Kim
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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