Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (30 page)

If the level of its ownership and domination is any guide, business was indeed the essence of American life. In a 1938 speech, President Roosevelt characterized the corporate world as “a concentration of private power without equal in history … a cluster of private collectivisms masking itself as a system of free enterprise.” One-tenth of 1 percent of corporations owned more than half of corporate assets and earned half of corporate income, he told Congress, while less than 5 percent owned 87 percent of the assets and earned 84 percent of the income of all of them. Three-tenths of 1 percent of the US population received 78 percent of all dividends—the equivalent, the president pointed out, of one person in every three hundred receiving 78 cents in every dollar of corporate dividends while the other 299 got to divide up the remaining 22 cents between them.
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Fortune
magazine, in contrast, advised business that it should present itself as “a public utility” rendering “well-defined public services” rather than as a money-making apparatus.
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The NAM campaign for the “American way” was massive. It replicated Creel’s World War I model in establishing local cells, “Special Committees of Public Information,” which enlisted local Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, and churches, as well as lawyers, teachers, and local dealers of the appliances and cars made by the corporations. These committees of influential people were responsible for the regional face of NAM’s multifaceted “publicity program”; they funneled articles, features, and films to newspapers, radio stations, and movie theaters; they sent speakers to the theaters as Creel had done, as well as to every local group of any sort (including women’s groups and what were then called “negro groups”); they distributed pamphlets and weekly bulletins to schools, clubs, and libraries.
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Aware that the adult population was cynical about the corporate claim to “service,” they aimed specifically at schools, where
Young America
, their weekly children’s magazine that portrayed capitalism as dedicated to looking after them and their communities, was sent to thousands of teachers, who used them in classroom assignments.
You and Industry
, a series of booklets written in simple language, linked individual prosperity to unregulated industry, and was distributed to public libraries everywhere.
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One million booklets were distributed every two weeks by the US Chamber of Commerce, which, along with the giant industrial corporations, was also involved in the campaign.
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The American Way campaign reflected the transformation of PR practice from a rhetoric of alleged facts, such as Ivy Lee had used in the early years, to a rhetoric of symbols and images that entertained the viewer (as recommended by Bernays) and, as Lippmann described it, “assemble[d] emotions after they have been detached from their ideas, … [causing an] intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance.”
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Images and symbols were deployed at all levels. Cartoons were distributed to more than three thousand weeklies; in one such cartoon, the “forgotten man,” symbolic of people destroyed by the depression, is portrayed as the fleeced taxpayer, and the “fat cats” are not corporations but pro-welfare politicians.
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Billboards looked down on every town of twenty-five hundred people or more by 1937 (figure 10.1),
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combining happy families with the slogans “There’s no way like the American Way” and “What’s good for industry is good for you.” Serials such as
The American Family Robinson
were sent to radio stations without charge and broadcast across the country through more than two hundred local stations every week;
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in this particular serial, a happy white family provided the setting for engaging stories that pitted their sensible, pro-business father against socialist troublemakers such as the benighted “Friends of the Downtrodden.” Movie theaters screened feature films and “documentaries” depicting the upward march of America, “a tale of uninterrupted scientific progress … a history driven by the genius of American industry.”
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The proliferating avenues of mass communication were saturated with this message.

Figure 10.1

Bread line under an “American Way” Billboard, Louisville Flood, Kentucky, 1937.
Source:
Margaret Bourke-White/Masters Collection/Getty Images.

Just as NAM’s activities had been covert before World War I, the avalanche of “American Way” propaganda in the 1930s continued the tradition. In its 1939 investigation into violations of labor rights, the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee (US Senate) found that NAM had “blanketed the country with a propaganda which in technique has relied upon indirection of meaning, and in presentation upon secrecy and deception.”
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NAM rarely disclosed that it was the originator and distributor of the innumerable films, radio programs, news editorials, advertisements, and purported news it circulated. The La Follette Committee slammed NAM: “They asked not what the weaknesses and abuses of the economic structure had been and how they could be corrected, but instead paid millions to tell the public that nothing was wrong and that grave dangers lurked in the proposed remedies.”
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The New York World’s Fair of 1939, the “World of Tomorrow,” was the business community’s last great PR extravaganza of the decade; it took the production of theater and spectacle to a new level. Again, while the rhetoric was uncompromisingly democratic— “this is your fair, built for you, and dedicated to you,” according to the official guidebook—space was sold to the corporate participants with the promise that this would be the “greatest single public relations program in industrial history.” Participants were counseled that it would not do simply to display their products—they must sell ideas. They must propel the public into a “world of abundance, where consumers could be kings and queens.”
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NAM’s pavilion, for example, aimed to fascinate and delight as it thrust private enterprise into the role of the true “friend of the downtrodden,” which could fulfill the promises of the New Deal: opportunity, security, and the greater good.
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While opposing government relief for the 12 to 17 million US unemployed, blaming the destitute for their own failure to practice sufficient thrift, and characterizing old age pensions as “socially inadvisable” and an “unwarrantedly weakening drain on industry,”
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the big-business people of the United States embraced a strategy of humanizing the corporation, positioning themselves as common folk cut from the same cloth as the ordinary rural citizen. US Steel adopted a “folksy classless persona,” portraying itself as “a bunch of hometown boys” making a few nails, and Henry Ford enjoyed unusual popularity as “the friend of the common man.”
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There were certain successes: the
Advertising Age
credited the National Chamber of Commerce with divorcing the word “big” from the word “business” in the public mind, and historian Wendy Wall identifies the rapid replacement of the terms “private enterprise” and “laissez faire” with the more appealing “free enterprise” in public discourse during the late 1930s, a change she attributes to the strategies of US corporate leaders in general.
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Republicans also did better in the congressional elections of 1938 and 1940 than they had done since 1928, but the American people continued to support their interventionist president. The corporate entreaty to oppose “restriction and regimentation” and to allow “the true creators of wealth to serve their constituencies” was still viewed with skepticism.
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The coming of World War II, however, was to be a boon for the business of propaganda and the propaganda of business. The Roosevelt administration had no choice but to reconcile with big business in order to mobilize for war, and the corporations were increasingly able to present themselves publicly as serving “the nation and the world so well in this hour of peril.”
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The war in any case fostered feelings of national solidarity and finally brought the return of economic growth, which would ultimately make it far easier for big business to cast itself as the friend of the people. War, like consumerism, is a wonderful driver of growth; it induces massive production of ephemeral products that, in war, are soon exploded and, in consumerism, quickly superseded.

War and Aftermath

Throughout the war, NAM’s rhetoric downplayed the role of government and touted the superiority of American corporate “know-how,” manifested in the heroic contribution of industry to the war effort (”the initiative, ingenuity and organizing genius of free enterprise”).
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This was blended with visions of a cornucopian future of endless consumer products, in which families would fly their personal helicopters and planes to the shops “as readily as you drive a car.” “Put my groceries in that blue helicopter,” one customer tells the grocer in a DuPont advertisement for cellophane reproduced by historian Roland Marchand.
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Privately, however, most US businessmen remained apprehensive about the future. They still saw government involvement and trade union influence as enduring threats. When President Roosevelt delivered his “Four Freedoms” speech in 1942 (discussed in chapter 6), businessmen thought he was missing the essential freedom: the corporate vision of the American way of life defined freedom first and foremost in relation to enterprise. The business community and their PR operatives insisted that a “fifth freedom,” the freedom of enterprise (or, as Noam Chomsky later put it, “the freedom to rob and exploit”),
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needed to be added to the other four. As champions of the “fifth freedom,” the corporations sought to wear the costume of the New Deal while undermining its values and priorities. Monsanto’s chairman expressed the wartime view that the business world was “engaged in two wars,” and Paul West of the Association of National Advertisers identified the greater of these challenges as that of winning “the war of ideologies” at home.
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Long-time California Chamber of Commerce officer Vernon Scott described the crusade that corporations needed to mount in this way: “We must constantly preach and prove that a planned economy destroys free markets, shackles free enterprise, reduces the standard of living for all, beats down private initiative, and cripples competition, the life blood of democratic capitalism.”
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Henry Link of the Psychological Corporation
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recommended a continuing strategy of manipulation that would emphasize the rights of all people, “a transfer in emphasis from free enterprise to the freedom of all individuals under free enterprise; from capitalism to a much broader concept: Americanism.” This approach, Link said, was based on research showing that “Americanism” had a “terrific emotional impact” that “free enterprise” lacked.
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Just as fear of communism had been a compelling tool for the pro-business thrust after the Russian Revolution in 1917, so too was the Cold War suited to corporate interests. By 1946, just a year after the United States’ wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, the Chamber of Commerce was already distributing millions of pamphlets with titles such as
Communist Infiltration in the United States
.
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The second Red Scare of the 1950s played a key role in creating a climate conducive to the protection of traditional property relations and to splintering the labor movement.
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While congressional committees terrorized intellectuals and film actors, and liberal radio broadcasters were fired, popular magazines ran lurid stories of imminent takeover, not unlike the sudden appearance, just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, of the spurious but widely publicized “proof” that attack by weapons of mass destruction could be unleashed on Britain or the US mainland within forty-five minutes.

The Chinese revolution, the Soviet development of nuclear weapons, and the Korean War all intensified the fear of communism and promoted antisocialist sentiment, providing fertile ground for the ongoing multi-million-dollar selling of the American way. Assisted by both history and consummate PR machinery, pro-business Republicans won control of both houses of Congress in 1948, and Dwight Eisenhower took the presidency in 1952.

Television was also a potent new tool in the postwar onslaught. Not only was the medium visual, bearing all the potential of images and symbols to manipulate unconscious desires, but these images could now be beamed directly into people’s homes. As RCA’s TV manager T. F. Joyce told a media conference in 1944, “we will have thirty million showrooms where personal dramatized demonstrations can be made simultaneously.”
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A number of conservative think tanks, characterizing themselves as nonpartisan, were founded in the late 1940s. By 1949, four thousand US corporations had set up dedicated public relations departments, and some five hundred independent PR firms were in business.
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By late 1951, business-sponsored films were drawing one-third of the US movie audience, 20 million people a week. In factories across the country, employees were given time off to attend sessions on economics as business saw it and the corporate commitment to workers’ welfare. By 1952, according to the editor of
Fortune
magazine, corporations were spending $100 million a year to sell “free enterprise,” an outlay that rose tenfold to $1 billion by 1978.
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