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Reviews in American History 33.3 (2005) 417-423



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Writing the Intellectual History of Fortune Magazine's Corporate Modernism

Michael Augspurger. An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. viii + 292 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $34.95.

In 2005, the front-page news about companies like Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom highlights a contemporary corporate culture of private greed, marking a dramatic distance from the world explored in Michael Augspurger's study of Fortune magazine and the shaping of corporate liberal culture in the 1930s and 1940s. In a recent essay, the economist Paul Krugman suggests that the "imperial CEO" has replaced the 1950s man in the gray flannel suit, and wildly inflated CEO compensation—rising from 39 to 1,000 times the pay of the average worker in the last thirty years—is an indelible marker of an increasingly accepted standard of widening inequality and concentration of wealth at the top. Krugman cites economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo's re-periodization of the twentieth century. They renamed the years from the 1940s through the early 1970s as the Great Compression, characterized by a growing middle class produced by a drop in the concentration of income at the top and a rise in incomes during the first postwar generation that was evenly spread across the population. Since the mid-1970s, the postwar corporate social contract has come undone. Political economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison identified a "Great U-Turn" in the change from corporate provision of job security, health insurance, and pensions that did not depend on the stock market to mass firings from long established companies, with the concomitant loss of health insurance, and 401k plans that do not guarantee a comfortable retirement. Although economists do not agree on what produced either the changes in the period of the Great Compression or what has produced the current revival of what Krugman dubs the new Gilded Age, he suggests that we consider changes in corporate culture and social and political norms of equality, which he sees as profoundly transformed in the 1930s and 1940s, and then remade especially in the 1980s and 1990s.1 [End Page 417]

Can a history of Fortune help to explain this shift? Michael Augspurger's book provides a close reading of the magazine from its inception in 1929 through the early 1950s in order to offer a window on the shaping of corporate liberal culture in the 1930s and 1940s. Augspurger is particularly focused on understanding the magazine's interest in promoting art and culture to its businessmen subscribers. But rather than exploring its connections to the broad social changes that produced the Great Compression, Augspurger is interested in producing an intellectual history of Fortune that can overturn the insider account shaped by its famous dissenting staff members. In this staff version, Henry Luce's original vision of a lavish publication to portray the heroism of business gave way, in the face of the Depression's economic crisis and in the hands of talented staff poets and writers Archibald MacLeish, Dwight MacDonald, and James Agee, to a period of unusual creative social exploration, until Luce regained control and got the magazine back on task as an ode to big business.

Augspurger's goal is to make sense of Fortune's "startling combination of a business focus with liberal social ideals, a critical edge, and a developed artistic vision," primarily by linking these to the intellectual self-conceptions of corporate liberalism and especially to a developing worldview of business managers that he sees at the heart of a rising professional managerial class. His major thesis is that "Fortune's cultural interests and its particular modernism illuminate the relatively coherent world view of its editors and readers" (p. 2). Augspurger sets Fortune's success in articulating its economic and cultural vision in the context of conflicts within the artistic sphere from 1930 to 1950. Here he compares how Fortune's cultural vision in the late 1930s competed with the democratic vision promoted...

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