Corporate Dreams: Big Business in American Democracy from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

Chapter 18 - The False Confidence of the Anticorporatists

122 Chapter 18 The False Confidence of the Anticorporatists “Ben—I just want to say one word to you—just one word . . . Plastics.” It became one of the most famous movie lines of all time. The well-off Braddock family is giving a college graduation party for their son, Ben, star of the track team and valedictorian of his class. A family friend has taken Ben aside and gravely advises that there is “a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” Young audiences whooped at this scene from the 1967 film The Graduate. The pompous phony dispensing one-word profundities was familiar to the era’s college students. He was a dad or an uncle, a salesman or a stockbroker, but above all a corporate fool and flack. Corporate intellectual pretense was personified by all too many business leaders such as Roger Blough of U.S. Steel, whose 1962 fight with President Kennedy was described in chapter 16. Years before, Blough had given a purportedly distinguished but actually leaden series of lectures at Columbia University’s business school. Addressing the subject of “Free Man and the Corporation,” Blough praised voluntary cooperation in human groups without a mention of the fact that from the point of view of a worker looking up, a corporation is an undemocratic, top-down power structure.1 The contrast between graceless heavies like Blough and a seemingly free-spirited president like Kennedy reinforced a rising conviction in the minds of many 1960s youth that the corporate life was not worth living. A subtle anticorporatism, focused less on economics and politics than on culture and style, flourished among artists and intellectuals. A generation would pass before the business world found a way to present corporate life as adventurous rather than deadening. The prevailing anticorporatism in youth culture and among intellectuals helped to convince liberals in the middle 1960s that all was well with their agenda for an activist government and an enlarged sense of public purpose. America’s future, they confidently believed, would inevitably surpass narrow corporate interests and free-market shibboleths. Grief over the 1963 Kennedy assassination had helped fuel the 1964 Civil Rights Act and, in the presidential election of that year, the victory of Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, over Republican Barry Goldwater. The next year brought the Medicare Act, providing national health insurance to senior citizens, along with a raft of antipoverty legislation under the rubric of the Great Society. The Great Society was the largest wave of social legislation since the New Deal, but with a difference. New Deal reformers had often aimed their bolts directly at corporations. The Great Society, by contrast, focused not on corporations but on culture, education, and welfare. Was this an implicit victory for corporations? However poorly corporations might have been regarded in 1960s popular culture, social reformers had not made big business part of their program. The question of why 1960s antipoverty campaigners saw corporate America as neither part of the problem nor part of the solution got no discussion at the time. Liberals, confident that they could fight for social justice through educational and social programs, left the corporation out of politics and economics. Anticorporatism was restricted to cultural discussions. Still, the appetite of university students for movies like The Graduate showed that youthful anticorporatism ran deep. The cultural victory and ascendancy in moral authority that the corporations had won over the labor unions after World War II had proved short-lived. A new threat had arisen to the corporations’ moral standing from an unexpected quarter—academia. The baby boomers went to college in the 1960s. The World War II generation provided higher education for its children in record numbers. Often, the parents aimed to school their children for the corporate success that had been so prominent in their own lives and ambitions. Yet by the time the 1960s students got their degrees, they were, to the dismay of business leaders, often contemptuous of the corporate world. The teachings of academics cut from the same cloth as David Riesman or, far worse, C. Wright Mills took hold in the mind of a generation. The young did not want to join the lonely crowd or the power elite. False Confidence of the Anticorporatists 123 And from 1965 onward, the Vietnam War also alienated many students from “the Establishment.” They reviled corporations such as Monsanto, manufacturer of chemicals that defoliated...