Fun and Facts about America: Postwar Corporate Liberalism and the Animated Economic Educational Film

Business leaders were worried. Labor insurgency in the wake of World War II indicated a new militancy among American workers. Even more troubling, opinion polls revealed that many distrusted both their employers and the American economic system. For many in the business community, workers' growing demands and their antagonism toward management suggested unions had bested private industry in the fight for workers' ideological allegiance.¹ At the same time, conflict was brewing within the business community between corporate executives and small business owners. During the war, large-scale manufacturers signed wartime production contracts with the US government and secured federal funds to build new facilities, giving them an edge over smaller competitors. As big businesses grew, they forced small businesses out of both industrial and consumer markets.² When government measures had allowed large corporations to dominate markets in the past, both workers and small business owners had fought back.³ If big business leaders hoped to preserve the gains they had made during World War II, they would need to persuade both American laborers and small business owners to accept the growing power of large corporations.

In this essay, I discuss an animated economic educational film series from the post–World War II era, Fun and Facts about America (John Sutherland Productions, 1948–1952).⁴ During this period, economic education was one of several methods business leaders used to promote the American financial system. The purveyors of economic education claimed their goal was to advance the public's understanding of how the US economy works. In fact, as Caroline Jack has shown, economic education was little more than a propaganda campaign on behalf of industrial capitalism.⁵ Historian Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolfe has described how business leaders used various strategies, including economic education, to sell Americans on the merits of US capitalism after World War II.⁶ While Fones-Wolfe's work focuses on how the business community addressed workers and the public, corporate leaders also used economic education to speak specifically to small business owners' concerns. Building on Jack's work on the series, I argue that Fun and Facts about America aimed to persuade both small business owners and American laborers that big business was on their side.

Fun and Facts about America was a product of the National Education Program (NEP) of Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas. At the time, Harding was a small Christian college, but it later became one of the largest universities in the state.⁷ Working through the NEP, John Sutherland Productions produced the series with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The series included ten-minute animated Technicolor shorts such as Make Mine Freedom (1948), in which an industrialist, laborer, farmer, and politician encounter a huckster peddling a bottle of snake oil called "ISM," and Fresh Laid Plans (George Gordon, 1950), which portrays the dire consequences of economic planning among a community of chickens.⁸ All celebrate the virtues of the American economic system.⁹ Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer exhibited several of the films in theaters. After the theatrical runs, the NEP provided the films free of charge to schools, community groups, and industrial firms to screen for audiences of students and workers.¹⁰

Fun and Facts about America is informed by what George Lipsitz describes as monopoly capitalist corporate liberalism.¹¹ Here, monopoly refers not to the existence of legal monopolies but to the market dominance of a handful of firms, preventing genuine competition.¹² Lipsitz defines corporate liberalism as a "philosophy of using state power energetically to balance the power of major interest groups."¹³ More specifically, it refers to cooperation between big business, organized labor, and the state to ensure economic stability and growth. Corporate liberalism predates the 1940s. However, during and after World War II, it flourished.¹⁴ During this era, big businesses were the beneficiaries of what Lipsitz describes as "one of the largest welfare projects in history—wartime industrial expansion."¹⁵ Large corporations, such as Alfred P. Sloan's General Motors, signed lucrative wartime production contracts with the US government and received...