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72 3 Business’s New Paradigm, “People’s Capitalism” Of all the great industrial nations, the one that clings most tenaciously to private capitalism has come closest to the socialist goal of providing abundance for all in a classless society. Twentieth Century Fund, 1947 After spending the Depression in the doghouse, American business roared back into public esteem in the 1940s thanks to its dazzling record of World War II production. Business sought to consolidate its good graces after the war, but it took the confluence of several developments for the business community to find a cluster of messages that resonated with the American people. From the late New Deal into the 1960s, business associations and major corporations sought to convey much more than that business was a beneficial presence in the community and country. Instead, business leaders worked hard to spin out elaborate philosophies not only of the centrality of a “free enterprise system” to the American way of life and the American creed but also of a distinctive new ideology that measured the meaning of life and citizenship in the United States in economic terms. Hardly created of whole cloth, it was an amalgam of ideas—warmed-over free-market economics; quasi-Jeffersonian individualism; early-twentiethcentury ideas about the primacy of “scientific” business management; watered -down New Deal and Keynesian ideas about mass purchasing power, full employment, and the need for some sort of welfare state; a half-Fordist , half-Keynesian belief that high production could only be sustained through high consumption predicated on high wages; a kind of economic Wilsonian belief in America’s exalted role in the world; and a somewhat reactive and sanitized redefinition of “capitalism” as a system in which all could participate as home-, stock-, and other property owners. These messages coalesced into a new version of American exceptionalism shared by other opinion-shaping elites, founded on the nation’s purportedly unique capacity to provide broad-based, quantifiable abundance. 73 Business’s New Paradigm, “People’s Capitalism” Emblematic of these business public-communications efforts was the widely expressed idea that America had developed a “new,” or “people’s capitalism.” Business leaders often favored the term free enterprise, and New Deal Democrats tended to speak of a mixed economy, with people’s capitalism, an attempt to split the difference. Many also recognized that in the international war of ideas the United States needed to develop an explicit ideology.1 Under this new system, the exploitation and inequality of early capitalism had given way, only in America, to a classless workers’ and consumers’ paradise in which living standards were equalizing and rising, and everyone had an economic stake in society. Moreover, business messages, by the 1950s and early 1960s, expressed a new belief that never-ending economic growth was possible. With only a touch of hubris, business leaders argued that they could orchestrate such growth, with assistance from government and labor, and provide both a private utopia for the American masses and the economic underpinnings for almost everything on the nation’s domestic and foreign policy agendas. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the Committee for Economic Development (CED), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Advertising Council, and other business groups and individual companies embarked on massive efforts to sell the American people on this new paradigm of America as an economy whose achievements could be quantified in terms of abundance. Upward of $100 million a year was spent by business organizations and companies on public relations, employee relations, and advertising these messages, selling workers/consumers a new set of reasons to be proud of their country. In a remarkable October 1946 memo of the NAM’s National Industrial Information Council, “The Public Relations Program of NAM,” the organization unabashedly presented its PR task: “Business is faced with the greatest selling job it has ever faced—the job of selling the solid benefits of the American Way to the American people against the competition of the glittering promises of the Collectivist way.” Although other business organizations such as the CED and Advertising Council—and even the NAM a decade or so later—took a more nuanced view that the task was more about selling the wonders of American abundance than relentlessly bashing any hint of communism or New Deal/Fair Deal “collectivism,” this statement reflected an important aspect of the postwar business efforts to influence American public opinion . Similarly, the chamber launched a “Program for American Opportunity through Advertising” in 1947, working with the...

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