In 2006, the budding Silicon Valley company Netflix made an important decision to strengthen its customer service. The company operated on a DVD-through-mail model that appealed to consumers tired of late fees at video stores. But the system was hardly perfect: customers faced long waits for high-demand movies, discs broken in the mail, and a confusing online interface. Rather than put a call center in India, CEO Reed Hastings went to Oregon to find “friendly people who epitomized the warm relationship he wanted with Netflix customers.”Footnote ¹ But why was there a need for friendly service reps? Why do companies require such onerous personality quizzes for low-wage interaction jobs when most consumers just want things done right? And what are we encouraged to ignore when organizations present such friendly faces? Daniel Robert’s Courteous Capitalism examines how corporations aimed to change the anti-monopolist sentiment of the Progressive Era through a unique strategy: better customer service.

Historians of the early twentieth century, particularly those studying law and business (such as Thomas K. McCraw, Laura Phillips Sawyer, and Martin J. Sklar) have debated why such sentiments toward antitrust and corporate regulation abated as the 1910s slipped into the 1920s. Robert decenters the debate in part by shifting away from elite capture and compromise between Wall Street and Washington to attest to the ideological transformation of common citizens across the nation. After all, “Branch offices were far more numerous than skyscrapers … and much more familiar to the public” (89). The answer? “Courtesy, not rates or rationality … offered the best chance to improve corporate monopolies while maintaining the overall monopoly structure” (30). In Robert’s account, these corporations “resituated then waning courtly behavioral codes and put them to work in defense of their corporations” (11). To put it bluntly, the “courtesy” demonstrated by employees in various regional offices across America contributed to a waning sentiment in corporate regulation.

In shifting this focus, Robert engages with the history of public relations previously covered by Roland Marchand and Scott M. Cutlip. However, rather than looking toward advertising and texts that have defined Progressive Era history, he turns to “face-to-face interaction” to try to understand essentially an emotional transformation (242). Corporations realized that their business involved exchanges of “words and looks, smiles or scowls,” in addition to goods and services (7). As they (mostly) abandoned Gilded Age practices of political corruption to protect their monopolies, they switched “from bribing the few to persuading the many” (236). Robert fixes his narrative on the new utilities of the era, including electricity, streetcar transportation, and telephones, where executives were particularly sensitive to the threats of nationalization. Chapter one takes readers through these threats and the responses by top managers “to realize the importance of their low-level employees” as agents to combat this reaction (32). Companies turned to forms of joviality when customers came into contact with their businesses, using training manuals, after-hours meetings, and classes to teach politeness, attentiveness, and appearance – especially smiling – among other skills.

As Robert charts through chapter two, these practices shifted labor relations where employees became subject to new surveillance practices. Rather than manage employees through Taylorism, managers judged attitudes alongside sales. Because consumer complaint cards often provided a distorted view, corporations employed “mystery shoppers to systematically rate utility employees on their job performance” (59). Robert also observes how, in reshaping employee behavior – often through Christian rhetoric and hoping for self-conversion in line with other reform and rebirth movements of the Gilded Age – corporations fought against individuality, instructing employees to “lay aside ‘all personalities’ in order to ‘advance the interests of our employer’” (33). Chapter three explores how consumers experienced this transformation not just in their interactions with employees, but also in the aesthetics of business spaces. Offices ditched single counters for open-office-style desks not only to improve the space available for friendly customer interaction but also to increase surveillance. Outside, utility companies hid electrical substations or telephone switching stations in adobe-style homes in the Southwest, and New-England-style homes in the Northeast – plus a “China Office” in San Francisco’s Chinatown – all meant to match the communities around them (106). In Robert’s argument, this corporate domestication of space “gave corporate monopolies the aesthetic of the middle class in the hopes of winning middle class good will” (112).

The argument broadens in the second half of the book toward more familiar territory for Progressive Era historians: the issuance of stock ownership, as well as corporate influence on newspapers, broadcasts, and educational textbooks. However, Robert continues to emphasize these transformations through localism. That stock ownership (covered in chapter four) likely pushed shareholders away from anti-monopoly attitudes is not new territory, but Robert traces this phenomenon at the same buildings where the regional clerks taking utility payments could “peddle stock to their friends, family, and neighbors” (133). In examining how advertising money convinced newspaper editors to publish pro-monopoly articles, often written by the corporations themselves, Robert centers chapter five on the localized relationships that gave branch executives the edge in page space – not to mention influence in hirings and firings. He also suggests a novel historiographic argument: the fall in sentiment as evidenced by the decline in newspaper articles was itself a result of tampering by corporate powers, not itself evidence of the sentiment declining. Where the argument perhaps falters in this latter half is in Robert’s attempt to draw a causal connection in the context of broader changes to corporate strategies. In focusing on newspapers, films, and textbooks, Robert does admit that these same tactics were those often adopted by left-leaning groups. More so, many such strategies were simply good business practices. Hollywood film press books, for example, were filled with dozens of potential articles for any newspaper to copy and paste to help promote any movie coming to town.Footnote ² Were tactics such as radio shows focused on domestic work uniquely designed for corporate protectionism, or were they just seen as good business?Footnote ³

To his credit, Robert addresses every chapter with a section entitled “Did ____ Work?” where he presents memos and other evidence – some anecdotal while others more definitive – where executives found evidence correlating their new tactics with successful rate hikes or nationalization plans abandoned. Although Robert occasionally provides examples of how this dynamic worked for Black Americans, Courteous Capitalism screams for a follow-up study centered on the South and segregated cities.

Whether or not one accepts Robert’s argument connecting these practices to the end of the anti-monopoly movement, the transformation of clerk-consumer dynamics endures. Companies still enforce smiles (or ask AI chatbots to act kindly), whether consumers care or not. Courteous Capitalism makes an essential contribution to understanding the development of both business and labor practices alongside the decline of the Progressive Era.