Corporate Dreams: Big Business in American Democracy from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

Chapter 12 - Creating Reagan and His Voters

76 Chapter 12 Creating Reagan and His Voters Graduating students turned out in large numbers to hear Lemuel Boulware speak at Harvard Business School (HBS) in June 1949, just a few days before commencement. The HBS class of 1949 would be renowned for its patriotism and its success. Many had fought in the war, had gone to school on the GI bill, and were destined for rich rewards in the corporate world. They listened attentively as Boulware outlined a conservative manifesto that, over the next thirty years, would spread into society at large and undo much of the New Deal. “Boulwarism” had recently become famous in the business world and infamous in the labor movement. The graduating HBS students had already studied Boulwarism in some of their classes. As vice president for employee relations at General Electric, Boulware sought to provide workers with economic education that would fend off union proselytizing . He aimed to make workers into appreciative, manageable citizens of corporate America. Boulware came to prominence as a result of General Electric’s attempt to improve relations with employees and the public following a bitter strike in 1946. GE had bungled public relations during the strike. Police had violently suppressed picketers, some of whom were newly returned veterans carrying placards that read “GI versus GE.” Although the great strike wave of 1945–1946 had alienated many middle-class Americans from the labor movement, the public made an exception for the electrical workers. Newspapers, politicians, and clergy had loudly condemned the electrical manufacturer. Americans mostly condemned GE and sided with the strikers. GE suffered a devastating defeat. To end the strike, the company had to double the wage increase it had initially offered. GE’s paternalistic managers had been shocked at the “bitter conditions” in their “relationship with our people.”1 General Electric President Charles Wilson—called “Electric Charlie” to distinguish him from General Motors’s “Engine Charlie” Wilson— turned to Boulware for help. Boulware managed employee relations at a number of GE subsidiaries such as Hotpoint. Not a single one of the sixteen thousand employees that Boulware managed had gone on strike in 1946. It was only logical for Wilson to assign Boulware, in the latter’s words, “to correct the ridiculous situation where . . . the company was distrusted and disapproved of by employees and neighbors.”2 Speaking in 1949 to the Harvard Business School students, Boulware attributed the bitter feeling against GE not to its sorry 1946 treatment of workers but to general social pathologies. He listed a range of grievances on which conservatives had dwelled since the New Deal and on which they would focus until the present day. Taxes were too high, government too big, and the nation in moral decline. But Boulware’s real focus in his Harvard speech was on a problem that, thanks to him, is of less concern to conservatives today. According to Boulware, too many citizens believed that corporations were “anti-social.”3 Ignoring the clear turn of public opinion in favor of corporations versus labor unions as represented in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, Boulware dwelt on lingering anticorporatism from the 1930s. It hurt. No matter how large the pay and perks of corporate folk, they could not be consoled for being considered enemies of society. Boulware told the Harvard students that the public’s contempt for business corporations is “our greatest distress.”4 Boulware nursed the pain of his pro-business audience with caustic and balm. Having touched their sore point, the contempt in which they were held, he inspired hope of self-cure by blaming them for the boil: “This can only be the fault of us businessmen ourselves.”5 Businessmen themselves created their negative image. They “always seem to be coldly against everything.” Too seldom did they “speak up warmly” about what they were for. That left the public ignorant of the fact that the business system worked for the “common good.”6 Boulware urged his Harvard audience to speak cheerfully about how they enriched the nation. “We are great physicists, chemists, engineers. We are phenomenal manufacturers. We have been fabulous financiers. We are superb in individual selling and mass marketing.”7 These same skills had to be used to tell the public that “profitable, competitive business” was a social good. Creating Reagan and His Voters 77 T h e C o r p o r a t i o n S t r...