Cronyism and Creative Destruction in Pittsburgh and Beyond: A Review Essay

January/February 2008 Historically Speaking 39 Alex Uchtenstein is associateprofessor of history at Florida International University. Most recently he coauthored (with EricArnesen) an introduction to a new edition of KatherineArchibald's'Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (University of Illinois Press, 2006). He is working on a study of kbor, civil rights, and anticommunism inpostwar Florida. ' In Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, andthe Decline of MiddleClass Prosperity (Random House, 1993) Phillips wrote: "Race was a catalyst of Dixie realignment, but by no means its only one." The others included "small-town and rural values, patriotism, doubts about welfare, religious traditionalism, and a hostility toward bureaucrats, ¡udges, intellectuals and the news media." 1 Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, andthe Transformation of American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1995), 12; Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 19631994 (Louisiana Sute University Press, 1996). 5Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the NewAmerican Right (Princeton University Press, 2001); Donald Critchlow, Phyla 's Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade (Princeton University Press, 2005); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew Lassiter, The SilentMajority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006);Joseph Crespino, In Search of AnotherCountry: Mississippi andthe Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton University Press, 2007). All have appeared in Princeton's "Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America" series, edited by William Chafe, Gary Gerstle, Linda Gordon, andJulian Zelizer. Interestingly, Crespino (Mississippi ), Kruse (Nashville), and Lassiter (Atlanta), all grew up in the post-civil rights South. * Lassiter, SilentMajority, 226. 5 Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, 39-40. 6 Lassiter's book, published in 2006, all but predicts the June 28, 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involvedin Community Schools v. Seattle SchoolDistrictNo.1. Interestingly, both Lassiter and Kevin Kruse signed an Amid Curea brief in the case, defending the school district's efforts to use student reassignment to maintain racial balance. 7 Thomas Schaller, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (Simon and Schuster, 2006). ! "??????," Citizen's Informer,July-September 2005, http://coverthistory.blogspotcom/2005/10/racism-in-conservative -movcmenthtm, accessed Sep. 17, 2007. 5John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The RightNation: WhyAmerica is Diffèrent (Penguin, 2004), 12. 10Thomas Frank, What's the Matterwith Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004). 11Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty:Aristocracy, Fortune, andthe Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Viking, 2004), ix. Cronyism and Creative Destruction in Pittsburgh and Beyond: A Review Essay Edward Balleisen It's a propitious time to reconsider the historical significance of the capitalists who oversaw America's emergence as the world's leading industrial economy. A full thirty years has elapsed since Alfred Chandler's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Visible Hand, codified the long prevailing interpretation of American managerial capitalism. Chandler's death at 89 this past spring by no means heralds the demise of his approach to the history of the large-scale business corporation. It's hard to envisage any treatment of business since 1880 that dispenses widi his emphasis on the central role of career managers at oligopolistic firms, their turn to modern research and development, and their refinement of decentralized management strategies. But two generations have produced quite a bit of scholarship probing the limitations of Chandlerian business history.' Perhaps of even greater importance than thirty years of historiography has been thirty years of history . Managerial capitalism has come in for something of a drubbing since 1980, if not before. The ossification of so many one-time corporate behemoths in the United States, first made painfully clear during the stagflation of the 1970s, led to pervasive criticism of professional managers. Long-serving salaried CEOs of poorly performing American companies , critics complained, lacked a sufficient ownership stake to keep them focused on the challenges of maintaining profitability in an increasingly globalized economy. Academic economists helped to lead this charge, calling not only for a thoroughgoing reliance on stock options as a means of executive compensation , but also for vibrant takeover markets. This combination of carrots and sticks would ostensibly encourage managers to make...