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Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community, 1920–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Kim McQuaid
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of History, Lake Erie College

Abstract

Contrasting with the resentment of other power structures, especially corporate business, that democratic governments display is the obvious need of the powerful and the productive for each other in times of stress. Professor McQuaid follows the activities of a group of “corporate liberals” (i.e., big business leaders who believed that intelligent collaboration between business, government, and organized labor was an attainable goal) from World War I through the prosperous 1920s, the despondent 1930s, and the busy and prosperous years of World War II. He concludes that corporate liberal opinion grew more influential in both corporate and governmental circles during and after the period.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1978

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References

1 The most complete discussions of business ideologies are Sutton, F. X., et al., The American Business Creed, (Cambridge, Mass., 1962)Google Scholar and Bendix, Reinhard, Work and Authority in Industry (New York, 1956).Google Scholar

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8 Owen D. Young and Henry S. Dennison were both “public” members of the National Industrial Conferences called by President Wilson. The two men's careers are discussed in McQuaid, Kim, “Henry S. Dennison and the ‘Science’ of Industrial Reform, 1900–1950,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, XXXVI (1977), 7998Google Scholar, “Owen D. Young, Gerard Swope, and the ‘New Capitalism’ of the General Electric Company, 1920–1933,” and “Competition, Cartelization, and the Competitive Ethic: G.E. During the New Deal Era, 1933–1940,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, XXXVI (1977), 323–334 and 417–428. Contemporary data regarding corporate liberal labor relations policies is available in Dennison, H. S. and Tarbell, Ida M., “The President's Industrial Conference of October, 1919.” Bulletin of the Taylor Society, V, (April, 1920), 7987.Google Scholar The “Industrial Conference” files in the Owen D. Young Collection, privately held, Van Hornesville, New York (hereafter designated Young Collection) are also very helpful.

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14 Brody, “Welfare Capitalism,” 16–17; Consensus: Official Organ of the National Econornic League, VIII (1923), 65; Filene, E. A., “The New Capitalism,” Annals of the American Academy, CXLIX (1930), 9Google Scholar; Girdler, Tom, Bootstraps (New York, 1943)Google Scholar, passim.; Hughes, J. R. T., The Vital Few (New York, 1973), 274356Google Scholar; Filene, E. A., review of Ford's, HenryMy Life and Work, Nation (January 3, 1923), 1718.Google ScholarHimmelberg, Robert F., The Origins of the National Recovery Administration: Business, Government and the Trade Association Issue, 1921–1933 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar is a very good source for the trade associational impulses.

15 Hurvitz, “Meaning of Industrial Conflict,” 242ff; Brody “Welfare Capitalism,” 161; Bernstein, Lean Years, 171–172.

16 Dunn, R. W., “The Welfare Offensive,” in Hardman, J. B. S., ed., American Labor Dynamics (New York, 1928), 224225.Google Scholar

17 Bernstein, Lean Years, 83–143.

18 Brandes, Welfare Capitalism, 141; Bernstein, Lean Years, 157–164; Brody, “Welfare Capitalism,” 162; McQuaid, “Henry S. Dennison,” 88, and McQuaid, “New Capitalism of the General Electric Company,” 330–331, discuss problems with stock-ownership and company union programs during the 1925–1930 period.

19 Nelson, Daniel, Unemployment Insurance: The American Experience, 1915–1935 (Madison, 1969), 2863Google Scholar; Slichter, Sumner H., “The Current Labor Policies of American Industries,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, XLIII (1929), 393ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar provides an example of the widespread academic belief that corporate liberalism was the wave of the future in industrial affairs. E. A. Filene to Lincoln Steffens, Feb. 10, 1927, Steffens Collection, Columbia University; Himmelberg, Origins of the NRA, 54, 76, 221.

20 Owen D. Young, Bernard Baruch, Robert E. Wood (Sears-Roebuck), Chicago banker Melvin Traylor, and agricultural implements manufacturers including Hugh S. Johnson and George Peek had warned of the ill effects of a depressed agricultural sector throughout the late 1920s — not least because such men had strong rural loyalties and backgrounds (Young, Traylor, Baruch) or because farmers were a key element in tehir businesses (Peek, Johnson, Wood). But such men did not transfer their warnings to the industrial or financial sectors.

21 Young to Brace Barton, November 25, 1932, Box 19, Young Collection; H. S. Dennison to Ida M. Tarbell, March 14, 1935, Dennison Papers, Harvard Business School; Dennison, H. S., Ethics and Modern Business (Boston, 1932), 5859.Google Scholar

22 For the Swope Plan, see Beard, Charles A., America Faces the Future (New York, 1932), 160195.Google Scholar

23 It is important to note that the U.S. Chamber and NAM cartelization plans did not, like Gerald Swope's, propose government regulation nor did they propose enhanced welfare measures in any but the vaguest terms. NAM and the U.S. Chamber simply wanted voluntary cartelization — and wanted little or no truck with Swope's other “corporate liberal” welfare and enforcement provisions. For Hoover's reaction, see Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929–1941 (New York, 1952), 334–335, 420.

24 McQuaid, “Competition, Cartelization, and the Competitive Ethic,” 417–420.

25 Burns, James MacGregor, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York, 1956), 177 ffGoogle Scholar; The spectrum of corporate liberal opinion regarding government-industry planning on the eve of the New Deal can be seen in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Manufactures, “Hearings on a Bill to Establish a National Economic Council, s. 6215,” (Washington, 1932).

26 For the gestation of NRA see Himmelberg, Origins of NRA; Lyon, Leverett S., et al., The National Recovery Administration (Washington, D.C., 1935)Google Scholar; Roos, Charles F., NRA Economic Planning (Bloomington, Indiana, 1937)Google Scholar; Hawley, Ellis W., The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, 1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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28 I am indebted to McConnell's, Grant fine Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, especially Chapter 8, for the substance of the preceding argument.

29 For the BAC, see McQuaid, , “The Business Advisory Council of the Department of Commerce, 1933–1961,” in Uselding, Paul, ed., Research in Economic History: Volume 1 (Greenwich, Connecticut, 1976), 171197.Google Scholar

30 “History of the Industrial Advisory Board” (bound typescripts), I, 1–2, Record Group 9, Series 37, National Recovery Administration Papers, Box 8336, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

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32 Hawley, New Deal and Problem of Monopoly, 175–176. For a specific support of Hawley's contention, see A. A. Berle to F.D.R. regarding “the Economic Council,” August 17, 1932, in Berle, Beatrice, ed., Navigating the Rapids, 1918–1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (New York, 1973), 59.Google Scholar By the early 1950s, Berle, along with his fellow “left-wingers,” Stuart Chase and David Lilienthal, had become a strong defender of an enlightened corporation capitalist order. See, for example, Berle's, The Twentieth Century Capitalist Revolution (New York, 1954).Google Scholar

33 “History of the Code-Making” (typescript dated March 2, 1935), NRA Records, Box 8784, National Archives, 1–4; Bellush, Failure of NRA, 46.

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35 Brody, “Welfare Capitalism,” 174 ff., Krooss, Executive Opinion, 193–194; “In Our Own Experience: An Informal Sampling of Employer Opinion on Industrial Warfare,” Fortune, XVI, (1937), 111 ff.

36 Johnson, Blue Eagle, 272; Tugwell, Rexford, The Democratic Roosevelt (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 312313, 326–340Google Scholar; Leuchtenburg, William, FDR and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York, 1963), 6768Google Scholar; Bellush, Failure of the NRA, 102 ff.

37 Hawley, New Deal and Problem of Monopoly, 97, 102; IAB Dinner Meetings File (meeting of October 12, 1933); IAB Regular Meetings File (meeting of March 23, 1934); IAB Dinner Meetings File (meeting of January 17, 1934); IAB Monthly Meetings File (meeting of July 12, 1934) — all in NBA Records, Boxes 8415–8416, National Archives.

38 H. S. Dennison, “A Five Year Plan for Planning” (typescript dated August, 1932), Dennison Papers; Loth, David, Swope of G.E. (New York, 1958), 241 ff.Google Scholar; Marion B. Folsom later recalled that employer support for New Deal social welfare measures was scarce in the mid-to-late 1930s. “Only about five per cent of employers” were for “anything along the lines” of Social Security. And even these preferred grants-in-aid to the states rather than outright federal administration. Roosevelt was “lucky to get five [businessmen] to go on a committee” to cooperate in formulating early Social Security procedures: Marion B. Folsom, Columbia Oral History Project memoir. Social Security volume (typescript), 9–11, Columbia University Libraries, New York.

39 Bellush, Failure of NRA, 140–155; Krooss, Executive Opinion, 175–177; U.S. Congress, House, Ways and Means Committee, “Hearings on the Extension of the National Industrial Recovery Act,” 74th Congress, 1st session, (Washington, 1935), passim.; Fine, Sidney, The Automobile Under the Blue Eagle (Ann Arbor, 1967), 410430.Google Scholar

40 Krooss, Executive Opinion, 185.

41 Krooss, Executive Opinion, 186 ff.; Owen D. Young and Gerard Swope took active part in the attempts at corporate-government rapprochement post-1934. See, for example, Young, et al. to FDR, February 16, 1938, Box 469, Young Collection; FDR to J. W. Hanes, April 27, 1938 and Young to unknown correspondent, June 9, 1938, Box 222, Young Collection; Flanders, Ralph M., Senator From Vermont (Boston, 1961), 180 ff.Google Scholar

42 See, for example, Polenburg, Richard, War and Society: The United States, 1941–1945 (Philadelphia, 1972), 536, 154–183Google Scholar; Perrett, Geoffrey, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People, 1939–1945 (Baltimore, 1973), 2930, 67–74.Google Scholar

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47 Schriftgeisser, Karl, Business Comes of Age: The Story of the Committee for Economic Development, 1940–1960 (New York, 1960)Google Scholar, passim.; McQuaid, “The Business Advisory Council”, 184–193; Baritz, Servants of Power, 142–149; Goldman, Eric F., The Crucial Decade – And After, America 1945–1960 (New York, 1960), 9, 269Google Scholar; Lawson, Failure of Independent Liberalism, 267–268.