The Business of America

195 Pages·2004·0.661 MB·English

by  Thompson, Graham

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The Business
of America
The Cultural Production
of a Post-War Nation
Graham Thompson
P
Pluto Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
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First published 2004 by
Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Graham Thompson 2004
The right of Graham Thompson to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1809 6 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 1808 8 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Thompson, Graham, 1965–
The business of America : the cultural production of a post-war nation
/ Graham Thompson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0–7453–1809–6 –– ISBN 0–7453–1808–8 (pbk.)
1. Business anthropology––United States. 2. Corporate culture––United
States. 3. United States––Civilization. 4. United States––Study and
teaching. I. Title.
GN450.8.T48 2004
306.4'0973––dc22
2003022871
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed and bound in the European Union by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
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For Blanche and Karen
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Part I White Male Literary Culture
1 Errands in the Post-War/Cold War Jungle 27
2 Entropy, Postmodernism and Global Systems 53
3 Postnational Recovery Narratives and Beyond 74
Part II The Difference of Gender, Race and Sexuality
4 Objectivist Fantasies and the Industry of Writing
and Piracy 103
5 Assimilation, Citizenship and Post-Ethnicity 125
6 Queer Profits and Losses 149
Notes 172
Index 185
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Anne Beech at Pluto Press for her patience and support
and to Emma for her own brand of ‘encouragement’ that helped me
get there in the end.
ix
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Introduction
THE BUSINESS OF BUSINESS
On 17 January 1925, United States president Calvin Coolidge stood
up to address the American Society of Newspaper Editors in
Washington, DC. Although his subject was ‘The Press Under a Free
Government’, the speech is best remembered now for an aphorism
Coolidge introduced to the cultural imaginary of the nation. ‘The
chief business of the American people’, he told his audience, ‘is
business.’1The repetition of the more familiar paraphrased version
of this remark – ‘the business of America is business’ – has turned
Coolidge’s observation into a familiar slogan. But it is a slogan whose
apparent simplicity disguises a powerful argument about the way
that the relationship between business and nationhood has been
conceived in the United States; a simplicity that also makes the slogan
ideologically malleable. Capable of being used to naturalise and
defend the operations of United States business on the one hand, on
the other it can also be used to criticise these operations on the
grounds that the problem with life in the United States is that
everything else is subordinated to the demands of business.
This book argues that these conflicting ideological values can be
heard echoing through post-war United States literature. They are
most evident wherever writers directly represent and engage the
various elements of business culture – its executives, managers and
employees, or the physical and mental conditions of employment
and entrepreneurship. Here, for example, one might place Arthur
Miller’s canonical Death of a Salesman, Sloan Wilson’s best-selling The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Ayn Rand’s impassioned Atlas Shrugged,
or Douglas Coupland’s zeitgeisty Microserfs. But such conflicting
ideological values also inform other texts at a fundamental level,
acting as the narrative unconscious of works traditionally appreciated
for qualities other than their treatment of business: books like Norman
Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot
49, Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Caféand Kathy Acker’s
Empire of the Senseless. The aim of this book is to try and understand
not only what drives this preoccupation with business, but also to
1
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2 The Business of America
study the various strategies that writers have used to negotiate their
relationship to the discourses of business.
By the discourses of business I mean three things. First of all, I
mean the way that business as a theme has been written and talked
about in the United States, by presidents, by social critics, by
journalists, and by novelists and playwrights. Secondly, I mean the
way that the historical accumulation of this collective input has
fashioned a set of rules that govern the way successive generations
can think about business. These rules need not be mutually supportive.
Coolidge’s aphorism is an example of how business might be
interpreted positively or negatively in the discourses of business.
What matters is that business is conceived within a recognisable
historical framework of ideas and themes. Think, for example, of the
way that ‘industry’ as a means of succeeding in business has exercised
various commentators. Benjamin Franklin in ‘The Way to Wealth’
has Poor Richard advise his audience that ‘Sloth makes all things
difficult, but industry all easy … drive thy business, let not that drive thee’,2
while J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur suggested that Americans were
‘all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and
unrestrained, because each person works for himself’.3It is this spirit
that one can see embraced in Horatio Alger’s self-help stories of the
nineteenth century and even in the political rhetoric of black leaders
like Booker T. Washington. In Up From Slavery, Washington writes
about educating black children with practical knowledge of business
but also of imbuing in them ‘the spirit of industry, thrift, and
economy’.4This is not to deny, of course, the important difference
between the subject positions of each of these writers, but merely to
emphasise the way that a discourse of business is created, and
enshrined as it is repeated.
Finally, I mean by the discourses of business the way that the
specialised and professionalised languages of business become tropes
and metaphors capable of being transposed outside of a strictly
business environment. When words like industry, trading, investment,
expansion, organisation and inflation, for example, are used in non-
business contexts they carry with them the legacy of their origins
into the new context. It is from within the confines of these discourses
of business that many post-war literary texts seek to define their
themes and characters.
One possible approach to these acts of definition would be to
consider the discourses of business as superstructural manifestations
of capitalist organisation. In terms of some of the books mentioned
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Introduction 3
above, this would mean bolting the themes of war, postmodernity,
sexuality and gender onto an underpinning capitalist base in order
to observe what Richard Godden has described as the ‘shards of
redundant logic and traditions of resistance littered across the
marketplace’ as capitalism is transformed by technological innovations
in the areas of both production and consumption.5 Whilst
sympathetic to such an approach and willing to draw on the work
of critics who have attempted such analyses, the objective I have set
myself here is somewhat different. What will coordinate my approach
is the link that Coolidge made between business and the ‘American
people’, and which the paraphrased version of his remark makes
between business and ‘America’. This book will examine, then, the
way that post-war United States literature has, throughout its
engagement with the discourses of business, imagined the complex
signifier ‘America’; a signifier that has been, and continues to be, the
subject of continual social, cultural and rhetorical reconstruction.
The conflicting ideological values that I have suggested are part and
parcel of a slogan like ‘The business of America is business’, suggest
that what is at stake ideologically is the configuration of ‘America’
itself. One way to start thinking about the implications of this for
post-war literature is to return Coolidge’s aphorism to the largely
forgotten speech that was its original context and see just how he
performed the construction of ‘America’ and the ‘American people’.
THE BUSINESS OF IDEALISM
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century – when the
motivations of national and global newsgathering and media con-
glomerates increasingly generate popular, governmental and academic
scrutiny – there is much in Coolidge’s speech that appears prescient.
Indeed, it rehearses a contemporary debate about the responsibili-
ties facing newspapers – and, for us, other media forms – in their
twin roles as sites of cultural information exchange and as
moneymaking enterprises. Coolidge constructed his speech as a riposte
against public concern with ‘the commercialism of the press’ and the
impartiality of the information disseminated when ‘great newspapers
are great business enterprises earning large profits and controlled by
men of wealth’. Promptly dismissing these concerns, Coolidge declared
‘it is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with
the business currents of the nation, is likely to be more reliable than
it would be if it were a stranger to these influences’. His justification
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4 The Business of America
was that only by understanding the ‘producing, buying, selling,
investing and prospering’ in which people were daily engaged could
a newspaper hope to fulfil its democratic, civilising role. And in a
piece of rhetorical mirroring that places his earlier comments about
‘the chief business of the American people’ into sharp perspective,
in his concluding remarks Coolidge maintained that ‘the chief ideal
of the American people is idealism … I could not truly criticize the
vast importance of the counting room, but my ultimate faith I would
place in the high idealism of the editorial room of the American
newspaper.’
Ironically, then, one of the most famous declarations about business
in the United States, far from being an endorsement of the primacy
of business in the construction of ‘America’, was actually an attempt
to refute this conviction. There are things for Coolidge that should
be desired ahead of the creation of wealth. ‘It is only those who do
not understand our people,’ he argued, ‘who believe that our national
life is entirely absorbed by material motives.’ The political and national
freedom Coolidge emphasises here he made a corollary of economic
freedom more explicitly elsewhere. A year earlier, at a meeting of the
Business Organization of the Government of which he was Chief
Executive, Coolidge told his fellow members that ‘any oppression
laid upon the people by excessive taxation, any disregard of their
right to hold and enjoy the property which they have rightfully
acquired, would be fatal to freedom’. Coolidge’s quest for freedom
in the service of a civilised ‘America’ – and he admitted it demanded
‘a constant and mighty effort’ – makes business only the meansby
which higher goals may be achieved. To paraphrase, then, one could
claim that for Coolidge ‘The business of business is America.’
Coolidge’s emphasis upon business as an enabling force together
with the link between economic and political freedom is worth bearing
in mind when thinking about the negotiation with business in one
particular line of post-war literature. White male literary culture, on
first examination at least, seems to have been straightforwardly
antagonistic towards business during this period. Emily Stipes Watt
has upbraided this group of writers, with only minor exception, for
its denigration of business. She notes that ‘Most businessmen depicted
in post-1945 television and serious literature are still characterized
as greedy, unethical, and immoral … whether they are JR of William
Gaddis’s JR: A Novel or J.R. of “Dallas”.’6 Indeed, it has rarely been
the case that the explicit ideological objectives of business or
businessmen have been ratified by white male literary culture in the