New Histories of Twentieth-Century Capitalism

The growing field of the history of capitalism sits at the intersections of economic history, political science, business, and social history. As new studies have come out over the last half-decade, scholars, journalists, and public thinkers have brought attention to the changing political economy, the role of elite actors in policy making, and the growing economic inequality of the late twentieth century. Richard R. John's and Kim Phillips-Fein's edited volume on twentieth-century American political economy and Marc Levinson's global economic study of the second half of the twentieth century challenge us to ask even more questions about the conventional understandings of twentieth-century capitalism. Both Capital Gains and An Extraordinary Time offer opportunities to rethink our understanding of the relationship between business and government and the role of technocrats in shaping economic development and growth. The essays in Capital Gains explore the often complex and changing ways that business leaders sought to shape policy toward their economic interests. An Extraordinary Time posits that the postwar boom that followed World War II may be a unique event that politicians and technocrats cannot recreate, one that provided global citizens with (relative) security and continuous growth.

Richard R. John and Kim Phillips-Fein divided the eleven essays in Capital Gains into three broad chronological periods, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and Second World War, and the postwar era. The final period has two sections: economic development and liberalism. All the essays fit within four themes as set out in John's introduction: the relative newness of free-market fundamentalism; the shifting relationship between business and politics; the diversity of motives that inspired elites; and the value of archival research to flesh out the study of twentieth-century capitalism (pp. 19–22). As John and Phillips-Fein emphasize in their openings, the main goal of the collection is to demonstrate the complexity of business leaders' efforts to shape state policy to promote economic interests of the private business sector. Using archival sources (especially from the Hagley Museum and Library), the contributors detail the complex opinions, and individual and group activities of business leaders as they examine the broader political economy of the twentieth century. Most offer a more complex look at the relationship between business and politics to illustrate how thinking of business elites as always being in opposition to government involvement in the economy elides all the ways many executives encouraged such developments, if aligned with their own economic interests.

Laura Phillips Sawyer's opening essay on the development of the United States Chamber of Commerce (USCC) is a great example of the diversity of opinions and actions within the business community during an important moment of administrative state building in the Progressive era. She illustrates how even when business leaders worried about Supreme Court rulings based on the Sherman Act, a seemingly adversarial situation, the solution was for cooperation between new national administrative offices and business organizations like the USCC. At the local level, Daniel Amsterdam details business leaders' boosterism efforts in Detroit and Atlanta as they sought to further their social agendas and make their cities attractive to other firms. Amsterdam shows how business elites mobilized together to help expand the social role of local governments. Elite actors in Detroit and Atlanta successfully increased municipal spending to deal with population growth, attract new businesses, and build infrastructure. As he argues, "businessmen's social politics … were an opportunistic mixture of antistatism on some fronts and strong support for government action on others" (p. 57).

Eric S. Hintz opens Part Two with a look at the National Association of Manufactures' (NAM) successful limit on patent reform. Hintz details how the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) included patent reform in...