Hard as it may now be to believe, American business experienced a crisis of confidence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Business was held in low esteem by the American public; some believed capitalism was endangered. Benjamin C. Waterhouse's stellar new study chronicles business responses to this existential dread in the context of the economic and political crisis of the 1970s, the conservative resurgence of the 1980s, and the neoliberal moment of the 1990s. Its sprightly writing pays special attention to organizational developments within various business communities that coalesced to represent particular interests and viewpoints and dissolved and regrouped in the face of national and global economic and ideological shifts. In so doing, it follows the mobilization of business as a political force influencing both popular perceptions and political power centers.
Waterhouse's book is no caricature of homogeneity or omniscience. Rather, it is a carefully researched, well-documented, and nuanced look at shifting concerns and identities. It depicts businesses and their associations as dynamic institutions, led by individuals with a wide range of conflicting views and buffeted by circumstances, all the while working to set economic and social policy.
Responding to the global and domestic economic instability of the 1970s, American business activists relied heavily on institutional players, old and new, to make their case against labor and the rights-oriented politics of the regulatory state. Indeed, that decade figures as the transformative moment enabling business to reinvent and market itself as the nation's rightful representatives and voices. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC) joined with insurgent right-wing think tanks and the plethora of newly created political action committees (PACs) to present a vision of un-American intrusions on the rights of both people and property. Local businesspeople were increasingly brought into the mix as vocal activists. National organizations provided them the platforms and rhetorical tools to reach their national congressional representatives. Waterhouse pays special attention to Lewis Powell's famous 1971 memo to the USCC calling for a formal campaign to validate free enterprise and a probusiness agenda, presenting it as a well-articulated—although not ideologically original—“tool for institution building” (p. 59).
NAM and the USCC, representing small to medium-sized businesses, were joined in the 1970s by the Business Roundtable, an organization of about 150 of the nation's largest Fordist corporations united to influence and shape national policies, although their members sometimes disagreed based on the effects of particular regulations. United to correct the conditions that they believed had brought their decline in the 1970s, these firms and their organizations collectively challenged what they had long considered the destructive political influence of organized labor and the rise of the regulatory state while lobbying Congress directly. If they could lower taxes and reduce inflation, they believed, they could control the evolving economic environment despite the fact that the crisis they were experiencing lay in the structural process of globalization and attendant deindustrialization rather than traditional domestic pressure points. To do so meant shifting the blame for the crisis onto government and American workers, painting them as the primary causes of the economic distress.
Business lobbying coalesced behind efforts to destroy the Consumer Protection Agency (CPA) movement that emerged in the 1970s. Drawing on some of the same antibureaucratic sentiment as the Naderite consumerist movement, the antiregulatory lobbyists united southern and western limited-government activists “where populist fears of an overreaching government largely reflected persistent antagonisms over racial politics” (p. 171). Utilizing “advertisements, editorials, and cartoons to weaken public support for the CPA,” they created an alliance against a more expansive federal role (p. 164). Insurgent conservative lobbyists turned consumer activists into special interests, pitted business against labor, and used the increasing hostility of Democratic as well as GOP representatives to block the CPA. These business lobbies effectively played a weakened liberal political leadership that lacked the strength and coherence to challenge this new agenda. Indeed, deregulation in the late 1970s drew on both lobbying efforts, although businesses were often pitted against one another and liberal antibureaucratic impulses and conservative and antigovernment ideology to yield profound changes in many economic sectors. As such, Waterhouse notes, “the politics of regulatory reform thus marked both a capstone and a turning point for the business coalition” (p. 200).
What followed, of course, was a period fraught with conflict over regulation, taxes, and spending. Accelerated depreciation advocates in business, and especially larger corporations in the Business Roundtable, battled supply-side acolytes among the USCC and NAM. Recession and deficits led to tax reform acts in 1982, 1984, and 1986 with businesspeople and their organizations engaged in furious lobbying even as their unity dissolved. Still, a new globalizing economic order kept both federal and trade deficits growing as imports surged, manufacturing declined, and business leaders split as to how–and in reality, if—the nation could or should end the economy's increasing shift to services, finance, and high-tech even as the Roundtable threw its weight behind campaigns for deficit reduction.
Tax reform, the rise of free trade, and financialization stimulated the formation of new employer organizations such as the American Business Conference and the National Federation of Independent Business, which joined the Chamber, NAM, and the Roundtable. But institutional, associational power increasingly gave way to individual lobbying handled by the armies of private lobbyists and PACs that, increasingly, made their cases and their donations to political leaders on behalf of firms and industry trade groups. As the last two decades of hyperactivity by business-funded lobbyists have demonstrated, “business's persistent political clout testifies to their lasting legacy” (p. 252). Waterhouse's Lobbying America provides us with the tools to understand the many twists and turns, the conflicts and contradictions, inherent in this profound and complex transformation.
