Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA

In 1974 two young academics, economist and New York Times columnist Leonard Silk and political scientist David Vogel, were hired to conduct a report on the ideas of business executives about the political condition of the United States. What they found was surprising: these apparent leaders of the American economy were in fact desperately anxious that most Americans hated them. After Watergate, Vietnam, the energy crisis, rising inflation, and unemployment, corporate leaders were terrified that they no longer enjoyed the easy support of the broad public. "Public acceptance of business has reached its lowest ebb in a generation," one executive told them (15).

Much recent scholarship on the political economy of the late twentieth century has focused on the 1970s as a critical turning point. This was, many historians agree, the moment when the social accord that had governed American life since the end of World War II broke down. It was the decade when the economic dynamism of the United States shifted from manufacturing to finance and services, and the steady economic growth of the postwar period came to its close. Rapid inflation and rising unemployment were signals that the underlying terms of the postwar economy were changing. This economic uncertainty proved the perfect climate for the rise of the conservative movement, which had been taking shape for much of the postwar period but only in the 1970s proved capable of winning significant electoral victories.

Many scholars who have written about the decade have focused on its social, political, and cultural upheavals. By contrast, Benjamin Waterhouse's remarkable Lobbying America, published in 2014, treats the reverberation of the shock waves of the 1970s as they affected American business executives. He argues that these elite figures were profoundly destabilized by the myriad challenges of the decade, political as well as economic, and that they sought to organize politically in response, reenergizing older business organizations and forming new ones, and developing new strategies to press their interests in Washington. Lobbying America is centered on three of these groups: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable, formed in 1972. These institutions "united corporate leaders from across industries and regions and formed the backbone of a powerful political coalition" (3). In the end, they were able to tap into "Americans' longstanding ambivalence toward state power" and to reshape public debates on "regulation, taxation and fiscal power by the 1980s" (3).

Lobbying America charts the increasing political anxiety among executives regarding the political position of business in the 1970s, and their efforts to intervene in policy debates regarding inflation, consumer protection, regulatory reform, and tax cuts. It offers by far the fullest accounts to be found anywhere of the transformation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the decade, and, perhaps even more important, the formation of the Business Roundtable (Waterhouse had access to archival records privately held by the Roundtable, which are only intermittently available to historians, depending on leadership there). He carefully outlines the range of ideas and debate among organized business leaders regarding tax cuts in the 1970s—for many executives, the focus was on the "capital accumulation movement": tax cuts that would focus less on income than on cuts that would foster new capital investment. Because of its rich immersion in primary archival work, the book is filled with insights and new evidence, setting it apart as one of the most valuable studies of the era—and indeed of business politics in the twentieth century more broadly.

Two elements of Waterhouse's approach stand out in particular. The first is the way that he situates the business mobilization of the 1970s historically, in the unique nature of the corporate elite at that time. This was, as he points out, a primarily managerial and industrial elite—people whose working lives had taken shape in the relatively stable corporate hierarchies of postwar America, and who...