Corporate Conservatives Go to War: How the National Association of Manufacturers Planned to Restore American Free Enterprise, 1939–1948

413 Pages·2020·4.883 MB·English

by  Charlie Whitham

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
AMERICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY
Corporate
Conservatives
Go to War
How the National Association of
Manufacturers Planned to Restore
American Free Enterprise, 1939–1948
Charlie Whitham
Palgrave Studies in American Economic History
Series Editor
Barbara Alexander
Department of Economics
Babson College
Babson Park, MA, USA
Since the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and the free-market
resurgence of the 1980s, American society has been enmeshed in a con-
tinuing process of profound change. Economic change has been oriented
around the regulation of business, the information and telecommuni-
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tinuing struggles around issues of gender, ethnicity, and family structure,
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will address topics of interest to scholars, undergraduate and graduate
students, and general readers drawn to the interplay of economics and
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ans, or economists working with historians.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14650
Charlie Whitham
Corporate
Conservatives
Go to War
How the National Association of Manufacturers
Planned to Restore American Free Enterprise,
1939–1948
Charlie Whitham
Edge Hill University
Ormskirk, UK
ISSN 2662-3900 ISSN 2662-3919 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in American Economic History
ISBN 978-3-030-43907-1 ISBN 978-3-030-43908-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43908-8
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reface
‘Hymn to Free Enterprise’ by ‘J.D.K.’:
For victory we’re giving all – at scarcely more than cost;
But how will victory help us if Free Enterprise be lost?
The war’s demands for well-laid plans most loyally we’ve heeded,
But peace is quite a different thing – no planning then is needed;
So, while today the state’s controls have stretched us on the rack,
The moment victory comes in sight we want our freedom back!
Chorus
Then hail we now Free Enterprise,
Extol and give it praise!
In armed revolt we’ll all arise
If any post-war party tries
To undermine Free Enterprise –
The Enterprise that PAYS!1
This unsophisticated ditty very much epitomizes the historical perception
of the National Association of Manufacturers during World War II. In
the slender historiography of the oldest and perhaps largest employers’
1This is a portion of a six-verse poem/hymn excerpted from The Nation of 18 March 1944
and reproduced in Saturday Review of Literature, 1 April 1944, Box 7, Folder 202, The
Papers of Frederick C. Crawford, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
ix
x PREFACE
association in the US, the NAM is cast as a vulgar cheerleader for the
interests of big business thrown onto the defensive after the Wall Street
Crash and feeling threatened by the power of organized labor. The task
of this organization of die-hard conservatives was to forcefully cham-
pion the virtues of private capital through a graphic propaganda cam-
paign designed to sway the minds of the American public against
federal patronage and in favor of business leadership after the war. Its
methods, like the hymn above, were crude and its goals transparently
self-interested. It is a version of the NAM that may well be accurate, cer-
tainly regarding its propaganda output. It is a version, however, based
upon scant primary evidence and scholarly research of the entire spectrum
of the wartime activities of the NAM, or any thorough assessment of the
impact that World War II had upon the outlook, policies and structure
of the preeminent conservative business organization in the country. Did
the experience of waging all-out war, like the rest of America, force the
organization to change? What else did it get up to? Was it in any way
successful in achieving its aims?
Finding answers to questions such as these are behind a decade-long
search by the author to understand the role of organized business in
framing US post-war domestic and foreign economic policy. After
1945, and especially since the creation of what is loosely described as
the ‘military-industrial complex’, studies which traced the influence of
America’s largest corporations in the political direction of the country
both at home and overseas have abounded. It is now commonplace to
attribute responsibility for this or that government policy to the indi-
rect meddling of interested corporations. Yet the scientific study of the
social and political role of corporations and their broader structural
function in articulating class interests, especially those which are organ-
ized into like-minded groups, is relatively recent and under-researched.
This is especially true of the pre-Cold War era, a notable failing given
that most scholars in the field of business history denote World War II
as the springboard for organized corporate influence on the US body
politic. Accounts that explore the responsibility of the federal state, on
the other hand, especially in framing post-war foreign economic policy,
dominate the scholarship on this matter. It was this gap in our knowl-
edge of the origins of modern-day organized corporate power in the
war and immediately post-war periods which inspired my first book on
this topic, Post-war Business Planners in the United States, 1939–1948:
The Rise of the Corporate Moderates. It was dedicated to understanding
PREFACE xi
the rise of that section of the US business community which responded
positively to new developments in American political economy after
almost two decades of depression and war, namely an activist state armed
with Keynesian fiscal interventionism and the incorporation of organ-
ized labor. Corporate moderates devoted huge resources to crafting a
vision of post-war America and to planning its implementation. They
came to occupy leading positions in the policy process and their out-
look became the mainstream in business thought for decades to follow.
The book showed that business elites played a very active part in shap-
ing the national discourse about post-war America. But what of those
in the business community that vehemently resisted any accommo-
dation of labor interests in the economic processes of the nation, and
stoutly opposed the creeping intervention of the federal government in
the affairs of business or the domestic economy? What happened to the
apparent ‘losers’ in the fight to dictate the business voice and to occupy
the high ground in the policy process? Did they, too, conceive an alter-
native vision of peacetime America and craft a thorough plan for its real-
ization? Even less scholarship has been devoted to the body of business
activists—known loosely as the corporate conservatives—associated with
that school of thought. In wartime America, the bulk of corporate con-
servative activists gravitated towards the NAM, and it is to documenting
the war history of this organization that this book is dedicated. By locat-
ing the NAM within the wider framework of business activism during
World War II we can better appreciate what drove and shaped its strat-
egy and policies. We may also begin to answer to what extent the NAM
was responsible for the well-documented rightward drift of the US dur-
ing and immediately after the war, and to assess the effectiveness of its
better-known propaganda methods for disseminating the business mes-
sage. Though its achievements may have fallen short of expectations,
especially when compared to its rival corporate moderates, this study will
show that the efforts of the NAM registered significantly in framing the
wider socio-political backcloth of war and post-war America.
Fortunately for researchers, since the early 1970s the NAM has dedi-
cated all its papers to the business archive housed at the Hagley Museum
and Library, Delaware, creating a single site for all investigations into the
history of the organization. The only other site of any significance is at
the Western Reserve Historical Association in Cleveland, Ohio, which
houses the family records of the long-time member and wartime presi-
dent of the NAM, Frederick C. Crawford. Together, these repositories