Corporate Culture as Public Culture: A Proposed Theoretical Framework

This article draws primarily on three bodies of literature to frame Du Pont’s 1952 anniversary celebration. First, I explore themes concerning public culture to establish the definitions of my argument; chiefly, Du Pont’s public relations at that time can be understood as a tool for the creation of an American public culture. Having clarified my terms, I situate Du Pont’s sponsored materials within the historiography of public relations to understand the uses for corporate-sponsored media. Finally, I consider the corporate uses of history to consider the rationale for Du Pont’s construction of historical narratives during the anniversary. The remainder of the article provides a close reading of Du Pont-sponsored media connected to the 150th-anniversary celebration, as a means to answer questions about how public relations is used by corporations to inform a shared culture at both the corporate and public levels, based on a cultivated, popular, and familiar history.

To begin, public culture as a theoretical framework developed from Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, which can be defined as the sphere in which private people come together as a public to engage in debate about the governing of society.^{Footnote 4} According to Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, Habermas’s conception of the public sphere “relies on the circulation of arguments between printed media and the oral conversation of coffee shops, salons, and similar gathering places for enacting critical reason.” Thus, the public sphere can also be described as “an imaginary community of extended conversations among people who are … otherwise using communicative media without conversing in the same place and time.”^{Footnote 5} An idealized public sphere is characterized by the principle of universal access.^{Footnote 6}

While the public in public culture can thus be understood as inclusivity or equal access of citizens to discussion, culture refers to what Donald Horne described as “the repertories of collective habits of thinking and acting that give meaning to existence.”^{Footnote 7} Put another way, “culture equips people to do the social, political, and ethical work required to live together.”^{Footnote 8} Horne explained how our concepts of culture are “socially constructed ‘realities’ that provide us with theories about existence, from which we can then think and act.” He acknowledged that dominant powers are responsible for maintaining our existing social order “not only by coercion but by the dominance of certain ‘realities.’” He also said, though, that because such “‘realities’ are constructed, there remains room for us to question, as well as, create our own ‘realities.’”^{Footnote 9} Indeed, Robert Hariman suggests that public culture is not fixed, but rather contains contradictory elements and is subject to contestation.^{Footnote 10} Nevertheless, constructed realities help to maintain stability in society and serve to preserve and justify the authority of the dominant powers.^{Footnote 11}

These realities, as described by Horne, are formed and circulated through mass media and communication. Public culture, therefore, can be taken to refer to the process of negotiating these realities, or what Marguerite Shaffer describes as the “shared meaning among a diverse group of individuals.”^{Footnote 12} Robert Hariman argues that the term can be applied “most broadly to the dynamic negotiation of beliefs, values, and attitudes regarding collective association through media and other social practices that are defined by norms of open access and voluntary response.” Such media and social practices include news, entertainment, the arts, advertising, and social media. Public culture as a framework consequently hinges on the idea that “the modern media generate a distinctive envelope of meaning that becomes a means for organizing and negotiating collective association.”^{Footnote 13} It can be understood as a “mass-mediated collective memory.”^{Footnote 14}

In addition, because the signs that make up a public culture are repeated and draw on existing social knowledge and realms of experience, the culminate effect is a limitation on the imagination regarding what a society can look like.^{Footnote 15} Likewise, public relations, with its repeated signs and symbols, represents how mass media can limit the public’s idea of what constitutes a proper and reasonable socioeconomic system. One way to think of public culture is as the commonsense wisdom held by a group.^{Footnote 16} I posture that the rhetoric used in the company’s sponsored media during the anniversary celebration represented the firm’s commonsense beliefs on what constituted the proper and ideal American economic landscape at that time: an unregulated economy. I thus read Du Pont’s anniversary celebration as an attempt to make the company’s commonsense beliefs on a free trade economy the nation’s commonsense beliefs.

Wally Olins has identified that as industrial organizations grow and become more complex, it is necessary for them “to develop a culture that enables people working within them to understand one another.” Olins, a corporate image consultant, emphasized how this culture is often best projected visually, which is by bolstering internal cohesion while also “showing the outside world what the company is like and how it can be expected to behave.” He described the visual result of this culture as corporate personality. He was most concerned about corporate visual practices in a practical sense, but his description of the culture itself is helpful for my discussion on company culture. Olins described a company personality as a group identity and pattern of behavior that differs from “the sum of the personalities involved.” Because of the scale of industry, corporations require a standard of behaviors to achieve success and efficiency in a way that creates the maximum of both internal and external goodwill. In other words, company cultures help fix permanent attitudes and standards of behaviors internally while also expressing homogeneity and strength outwardly.^{Footnote 17}

Historians have also written about the construction of corporate cultures. For instance, Clark Davis’s Company Men examines the growth of white-collar work in early twentieth-century Southern California and its resulting urban corporate culture. Davis points to the changing nature of work at that time as a source of tension between employers and employees. In particular, the growth of big business and the emergence of office work threatened nineteenth-century conceptions of gender roles and middle-class identity, making it difficult to build and manage vast hierarchies of loyal employees. To combat personnel obstacles, executives sought to craft a new type of company culture. Davis describes this as “the formal and informal rules and understandings that make corporations distinct institutions.” Corporate culture was thus used to recruit, motivate, and retain large numbers of personnel in organizations in which management had no control over daily operations.^{Footnote 18}

Building on Clark’s arguments, Polly Reed Myers emphasizes how company culture is a process consisting of people and work rules, in which negotiated expectations shape employees’ experiences. Her research on Boeing’s corporate culture emphasizes how certain values become normalized, which in turn fosters social hierarchies and unwritten codes of conduct. In the broadest sense, company culture includes the written and unwritten expectations for workplace relations, day-to-day operations, regulatory policies of management, and assumptions for the employees. She specifically points to the use of familial metaphors deployed by corporate executives to foster a workplace culture meant to maintain and govern a stable workplace; build community; foster loyalty; protect profits; and avoid conflicts with employees, unions, and the federal government. In turn, corporate culture offers a means by which industrial workers can make sense of their environment and develop strategies for building camaraderie.^{Footnote 19}

Du Pont’s postwar training program, entitled “How Our Business System Operates,” as well as its employee relations magazine, Better Living, offer two examples of how company executives consciously promoted a corporate culture at the company level. These efforts in industrial policy stressed a commitment to free enterprise as the key to American prosperity and security.^{Footnote 20} When these ideological messages moved from the plant to the public through Du Pont-sponsored media, the corporate culture of the firm became public culture. Within this context, the 150th-anniversary materials can be read as the commonsense wisdom of those who shaped the campaigns. Du Pont executives accepted their corporate culture as good, and thus also considered it a worthy public culture.

Although I theorize that the anniversary materials reflect the beliefs of Du Pont executives, as based on the use of the corporate culture–public culture framework, it remains difficult to ascertain the full impact such campaigns had on the American public. Indeed, the body of literature on public relations remains divided on whether corporate-sponsored image campaigns are successful in shaping or changing public opinion, which is the historically expressed goal of such campaigns by industry experts and business executives. Nevertheless, most scholars agree that public relations campaigns were used by businesses in the twentieth century, with varying degrees of success, to craft and promote company identities meant to correct communication problems confronting modern industry. For instance, in his seminal work Creating the Corporate Soul, Roland Marchand explains how the rapid growth of big business at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century threatened the nexus of traditional social institutions. In order to promote businesses’ legitimacy in a changing American society, corporations turned to public relations to craft and promote humanizing fables that would in turn gain the trust, loyalty, and affection of the public.^{Footnote 21}

William L. Bird also addresses issues of legitimacy as the motivation behind public relations campaigns. More pointedly, he argues that the Great Depression caused large corporations to, in words of Stuart Hall, lose “‘the symbolic power to map or classify the world for others.’”^{Footnote 22} Facing the apparent failure of the capitalist system during the financial crisis, big business came under increasing attack from New Deal governmental policies and the public at large. To counter these allegations, corporations turned to public relations and advertising specialists to frame American economic and political discourses in their favor. In this narrative, corporate-sponsored media was used to regain the respect and support of the American public for a free enterprise system.^{Footnote 23}

In contrast, although neither Elizabeth Fones-Wolf nor Howell John Harris dispute that the business community perceived the American public as hostile to business, their work contends that the specific issue confronting industry during the twentieth century was the labor question. Both scholars point to concerns over labor militancy, an unreliable and volatile workforce, and spread of unionization as the primary motivating factors behind public relations and industrial policy of big business. In this context, corporate-sponsored materials, policy, and political action can be read as tools meant to foster a culture that supported big business, and which effectively hindered the ambitions of organized labor in the post-World War II period.^{Footnote 24}

Karen S. Miller is not entirely convinced by the argument presented by Fones-Wolf, doubting the overall impact public relations has on shaping public opinion. By examining the institutional history of one public relations firm—Hill and Knowlton—Miller seeks to illustrate how public relations executives worked with and for their corporate clients. For Miller, the impact of public relations campaigns is evident not in their ability to sway public discussion but to reaffirm business leaders’ existing beliefs about America’s socioeconomic landscape, thereby, legitimizing business leaders’ political and economic actions and decisions.^{Footnote 25} I agree with Miller in that public relations can be read as the ways in which the business community understands itself inside and outside of the dominate culture, but I question her emphasis on its scope of impact.

It is here where public culture provides a useful framework to move the discussion of public relations away from questions of impact to instead consider the construction and limitations of hegemonic power. Donald Horne reminds us: “A public culture is simply a limited set of representations of a society in the more general setting of what existence might be.” Undeniably, public culture as a framework acknowledges that a public culture is neither a representation of society nor “even a representation of all the principal actors in the power relationships of that society.” Nevertheless, as representations of constructed realities, it can be assumed that “people do act in ways that guard public cultures.”^{Footnote 26} Given this framework, I suggest public relations campaigns represent a public culture articulated by a limited group of individuals: corporate elites. Such individuals have specific values in mind when articulating public relations campaigns, and the resulting corporate-sponsored media can be read as an attempt to guard these values. I suggest that public relations can be read as the culmination of how businesses chose to see an idealized American socioeconomic landscape. In my study, then, corporate-sponsored materials provides insight into how one group crafted, understood, and attempted to guard the their social realities at mid-twentieth century.

Given this line of reasoning, David E. Nye’s Image Worlds suggests a different yet crucial methodology to reading public relations materials. Advocating for a holistic approach to the study of corporations, Nye suggests a researcher may read a corporation’s creation and control of public relations materials as “a metaphor for its cultural hegemony,” thereby recognizing “the corporation’s role as a symbol making” and “ideological force in American society.” Taken as a whole, these images represent the corporation’s values or patterns of concerns; by analyzing them, it is possible to understand the ways in which corporate elites seek to articulate, promote, and defend a public culture that suits their needs.^{Footnote 27}

I therefore propose that when public relations products are read, such as the Du Pont anniversary materials, one is reading the institution’s idea of what makes up an ideal public culture. Du Pont developed its public culture through the construction of a national history interpreted through the lens of business specifically by linking the history of the company to the history of the nation. While relying on one conception of America’s past, Du Pont executives promoted a historical memory meant to bolster the identities of workers in the company, as well as the later public audience, through the anniversary messages. In sum, the anniversary materials are evidence of how a corporate culture can become a public culture, indicating that public relations campaigns are tools used to create and reinforce meaning within a group by drawing on familiar imagery and a shared social knowledge. Ultimately, historians of mid-twentieth-century business can use public relations as a means by which to view the American socioeconomic system championed by the business community during that period.

Organizational history scholars have long acknowledged the importance of historical narratives used by businesses, but they typically focus on how narratives about managers and their organizations have been used to inform or guide present business actions. More recently, scholars have begun to theorize on how businesses can use historical narratives as a strategic resource. For instance, William Foster and colleagues explain how history builds a common interpretation of events. Organizational histories, in particular, serve to connect firms and their employees to a shared collective past and to broader collective arrangements. Thus, by constructing a history, corporations are able to make connections, emphasize associations, and structure identity inside and outside of an organization. They posture that the construction of historical narratives depend on the specific goals of a company and the audiences it is trying to reach. Such goals may include developing the organization’s culture, building identity, promoting authenticity, and/or enhancing legitimacy.^{Footnote 28}

Using this framework, history is not something that happens to an organization, but is a process that managers control and shape. Historical narratives result from the interpretation, appropriation, and mobilization of the past to fit current and future needs and to provide frames for behavior or action. Such constructed narratives are developed not only to cope with change and uncertainty but also to produce stability and continuity.^{Footnote 29} Roy Suddaby and colleagues elaborate on the actively constructed nature of history. They argue that “history, and its symbolic manifestation through tradition and ritual, is often an elaborate invention used to frame and motivate action and to construct an imagined sense of common identity and vision.” Furthermore, history can be used to evoke and persuade, impose culture, create community, motivate commitment, and provide framing for change.^{Footnote 30}

Executives at Du Pont purposely constructed twin narratives of national and corporate history in order to evoke both a company and public culture that reaffirmed identity and legitimacy at a time when antitrust allegations threatened to tarnish the image and reputation of the firm. In particular, Du Pont’s founding narrative as deployed at the time of the anniversary celebration is evidence of what Suddaby and colleagues describe as the process by which organizational sagas are used to “reinforce a strong collective understanding of [a firm’s] collective history and purpose.”^{Footnote 31} Likewise, Mads Mordhorst considers “businesses as both embedded in and simultaneously creators of national identity and culture.” In particular, he proposes the use of the history-as-memory approach, championed by Pierre Nora, as an analytical tool to describe the ways in which businesses become cultural actors and both the producers and products of historical consciousness.^{Footnote 32}

Mordhorst agrees with Nora’s assertion that if memory is created, then it can also be assumed meaning is assigned to past events. To that end, “the construction of historical consciousness is to be viewed as a battlefield of a widely ramified set of actors with different interests where all strive to make their views and interests hegemonic.” As there are multiple actors with varying narratives at stake, interest and ideology are often present in the creation of historical narratives. Mordhorst understands corporations as just one of these many actors in the battle over memory and history. Within this context, historical narratives can be understood as efficient tools for creating order, giving meaning, and offering explanations.^{Footnote 33}

By situating Du Pont’s anniversary celebration within the firm’s larger public relations philosophy, the remainder of the article explores how Du Pont used a constructed history to root the firm’s corporate and public cultures as a zealous commitment to free enterprise. In particular, I explore the ways in which the company conflated its history with the history of the du Pont family, and how, in turn, its early corporate history was conflated with the nation’s early history. Finally, I consider how Du Pont executives used these constructed narratives to bolster arguments that unfettered free enterprise was the ideal American socioeconomic system, ultimately taking a corporate culture and making it public. To that end, Du Pont’s 150th-anniversary celebration serves as a window into corporate value creation during the mid-twentieth century.

Du Pont’s Public Relations Philosophy at Mid-Twentieth Century

Above all else, Du Pont’s anniversary celebration was the product of the firm’s public relations philosophy in the post-World War II period. Public relations were understood as a channel by which a company could speak directly to the public in order to mediate how the company was perceived. Although Du Pont was one of the largest chemical corporations in America after the war, it was subject to criticism. The company’s executives remained extremely sensitive to what they perceived as misinformation and unfounded attacks coming from the media, government, and the American public. As a result, Du Pont public relations campaigns were conceived as a means to correct these misunderstandings and provide factual information about the company as well as promote the virtues of the chemical industry and free enterprise.^{Footnote 34} A large part of Du Pont’s public relations campaign was to interpret the company’s chemical research for the general public in order to refute its image as a dangerous munitions company and to create a better understanding of the company’s contribution to the general welfare of the nation. Du Pont executives sought to improve the company’s image by demonstrating its importance in the progress of the country, its development of necessary products demanded by industry, the filling of needs by new products, and good relations with its employees.^{Footnote 35} At the same time, the company sought to correct misinformation through the presentation of what executives considered facts about the chemical industry and the company.^{Footnote 36}

In 1944 Harold Brayman became Du Pont’s public relations director, at which time he inherited a department that was an outgrowth of negative press garnered from alleged war profiteering during World War I. Accusations against the company reached a crescendo with a widely read indictment of the international arms industry, entitled The Merchants of Death, resulting in the 1934 Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry headed by Senator Gerald P. Nye (R–ND).^{Footnote 37} While the company successfully refuted all charges, the Merchants of Death moniker stuck. That following year, Du Pont launched its first concerted effort at institutional advertising under the slogan “Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry,” along with the corporate-sponsored radio program Cavalcade of America. The company was aided in its institutional sponsorship by the advertising agency of Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO). With these overtures, Du Pont executives intended to rehabilitate and recast the company image from a deadly munitions dealer to a champion of chemical science with benefits for American consumers.

During his tenure, Brayman articulated a concrete and formal public relations philosophy for the company, shaped by how he and his peers perceived the socioeconomic landscape of postwar America. In speeches, internal company documents, and a 1967 published book, entitled Corporative Management in a World of Politics, Brayman consistently argued that every corporation in every field faced its own unique communication challenges, but that business as a whole shared the challenge of a hostile public toward business that resulted in “government action antagonistic to enterprise.”^{Footnote 38} Should business not retaliate against this campaign of misunderstanding, industry was posed to lose profits, and the American population, by “accepting a state-dominated economy,” would lose their freedom and standard of living.^{Footnote 39} According to his circulated philosophies on public relations, Brayman contended it was American industry that was the basis of national strength and well-being. He championed businesses as those that made American progress and standards of living possible through industry’s lower costs, improved performances, and industrial research.^{Footnote 40} This belief in the benefits of industrialism over political solutions would anchor Du Pont’s corporate culture in the postwar period, and would be at the forefront company-sponsored media products both inside and outside the factory. How, though, did Brayman envision successful public relations for Du Pont?

He designed a precinct system as the basis of Du Pont’s PR philosophy. At the heart of the system was the belief that “the place where each company can most be effective is with its own employees, customers, suppliers, stock-holders, and the people who live in its own plant towns.”^{Footnote 41} Of these various publics, Brayman argued, “the employees rank first in importance,” because they “have been subjected over the years to an endless barrage of misinformation and false accusations concerning industry.”^{Footnote 42} Fones-Wolfe has described how, from the Great Depression to the early Cold War, the American business community viewed New Deal liberalism and a militant organized labor movement as the biggest threats to liberty and democracy; after World War II, these threats seemed to intensify, and American corporations responded with “an aggressive campaign to recast the political economy of the United States” into a society sympathetic to business interests.^{Footnote 43} These fears were compounded by the perceived spread of communist ideology in the early days of the Cold War, which seemed to threaten the very fabric of the American way of life.^{Footnote 44} Taken together, these alternative visions of America’s socioeconomic system made up what Brayman described as “the barrage of misinformation”; given this context, Du Pont executives felt their beliefs and interests were being threatened by encroaching external factors, chief among them being high taxes and governmental regulation. Motivated by these fears, executives sought to correct perceived misunderstandings about the business system in order to sway employees away from anything less than a belief in unfettered free enterprise.

In addition to shaping ideological messages within the factory, these fears also informed Du Pont’s public culture in the postwar period, which was primarily communicated through the company’s public relations strategies. As David E. Nye notes, messages present in public relations create and promote shared symbols and ideology. It is possible, therefore, to interpret corporate-sponsored images as the manifestation of a corporation’s values—its pattern of concerns—and how its members perceive socioeconomic relations. In aggregate, corporate images or messages are a means by which a company can share its view of the social world to different groups.^{Footnote 45} For Du Pont in the postwar period, the company’s public relations campaigns were tailored to specific problems as they arose, but its sponsored media would also constantly aim to counteract the public’s lasting hostility toward business in general.^{Footnote 46} In other words, while the company’s image problems varied over time (from war profiteering in the interwar period to antitrust attacks in the postwar period, for instance), Du Pont consistently promoted the same solution: a probusiness “American Way” in which U.S. industry provided for the socioeconomic needs of the nation. The result was a coherently ultraconservative public culture, which was tirelessly promoted in Du Pont-sponsored materials, especially during the 150th-anniversary celebration.

The government’s antitrust actions against the company were considered the specific communication problem for this celebration. Du Pont had a long history of such actions, with the company facing six antitrust indictments during the 1940s alone.^{Footnote 47} These cases were put on hold during World War II in exchange for patriotic cooperation between business and the state. However, at the war’s conclusion, these pending suits resumed, along with new charges over paints, cellophane, wood finishes, brake fluid, and its General Motors stock. At the time of the anniversary celebration in July, Du Pont’s legal team was preparing for the opening of the General Motors antitrust trial in November of that same year.^{Footnote 48}

Du Pont’s antitrust suits indicated to executives that the company was a victim of a misinformation campaign, which threatened not only the company’s well-being but also the nation’s. If the public, and thus the government, could be made to grasp the necessity of large corporations such as Du Pont, these lawsuits would be seen as illogical and unpatriotic. Bettina F. Sargeant, of the PR department, conveyed this sentiment in 1966. Looking back on the 150th-anniversary celebration, she stated:

As a result, Du Pont’s sponsored anniversary material sought to convey “that large size in industry is a natural and desirable thing; that Du Pont had grown with the growing nation and had attained its size as a natural development of its contributions to the nation; further, that a nation can grow in strength only as its industry grows.”^{Footnote 50} The 150th anniversary was seen as an opportunity to advance the public culture of Du Pont, which attempted to unite the well-being of the entire country with the growth and success of the company in its public relations. More pragmatically, the success of such a strategy would allow Du Pont to justify its place in the nation’s socioeconomic order, thereby undermining current and future antitrust lawsuits.

Within the previously mentioned Du Pont precinct system, the employee came first; thus it was in the factory where executives sought to correct the perceived misunderstandings about the company and free market economics. A memo in 1950 outlining the proposed program for the anniversary in 1952 emphasized the importance of employees as the primary receivers of anniversary messages concerning progress and growth as linked to the history of the company; stockholders, customers, suppliers, and the general public were to be secondary audiences.^{Footnote 51} Du Pont’s interest in its employees was not particularly surprising, given that large corporations had long proven their status as good citizens by displaying compassionate, if paternalistic, concern for their workforce. By expressing interest and enacting shared social rituals, Marchand argued companies sought “to secure social legitimacy, that is, public acceptance of its moral right to occupy a major, even dominating, place within the nexus of fundamental social structures.” Furthermore, public relations humanize and exalt a corporation through familiarization, with the ultimate goal to represent the company as less distant and alien and more like a good neighbor and citizen crucial to American democracy.^{Footnote 52} Du Pont executives sought to endear the company to employees by repeating familiar stories about the founding and linking it to the economic and cultural fabric of the nation. With these narratives, Du Pont was not only a contributor to the success of the nation but also a necessary and good citizen.

Du Pont’s Anniversary Celebration: Family as Corporation and Corporation as Nation

It is this public relations plan that led Edwin A. Tracy, a personnel assistant at the Du Pont Chattanooga Nylon plant, and his wife to load their fishing gear into their car for a three-week vacation starting on Friday, July 11, 1952. Their trip included a stay at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware. On Thursday, July 17, Tracy was joined at the hotel by another longtime plant employee, Nicholus McPherson, a welder craftsman in the plant’s Field Project Group.^{Footnote 53} The two men were among 261 special guests of the Du Pont Company: all were employees representing plants, laboratories, and offices from thirty states.^{Footnote 54}

Tracy and McPherson, along with the other special guests, participated in a variety of activities over the weekend, but the afternoon of Friday, July 18 would represent the high point of everyone’s visit to Wilmington, and the reason that they had all made the journey: Du Pont’s celebration of its 150th anniversary. Sixty-nine buses chartered for the afternoon brought out-of-town and Wilmington employees to the site of the original Du Pont mill grounds.^{Footnote 55} Nearly 7,000 guests (6,000 of whom were current and retired employees)^{Footnote 56} gathered for the hour-long ceremony, which included three dramatic scenes detailing the early struggles of founder E. I. du Pont. This reenactment was a means to establish the creed of the company, particularly by connecting it to the appeal of the new nation of the United States. In the dramatization, E. I. explains to his wife, Sophie, that the American nation is an ideal location for a new enterprise because of its commitment to liberty. However, this freedom could not be squandered but was a responsibility to be preserved and expanded. The dramatization explained that the new homeland possessed “the nobility of self-respect and the privilege of freedom. And that privilege, too, is inseparably bound to duty. For it puts each man under a solemn obligation to work, to strive, to persevere … to dedicate his life to the preservation of this golden thing called freedom.”^{Footnote 57} Other festivities included musical performances by the Du Pont Chorus (clad in nineteenth-century costumes), speeches by three executives, and the unveiling of an anniversary marker.^{Footnote 58}

While the center of the companywide celebration was at the site of the original gun powder mill on the Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, many other Du Pont plants throughout the nation conducted their own programs. In Tennessee, for example, the Chattanooga plant hosted an open house for employees, their families, and their friends. Guests entered the plant’s lobby and were greeted by a gigantic birthday cake with 150 candles. In addition, Chattanooga employees were given the anniversary book Du Pont, the Autobiography of an American Enterprise, while plant visitors received souvenir pamphlets.^{Footnote 59} At 3:00 p.m., the National Broadcasting Company carried Du Pont’s Wilmington celebration on a coast-to-coast radio broadcast. Many employees and their friends listened in their homes, while those who could be excused from their work gathered in plants to listen.^{Footnote 60}

Central to these events was the founding myth of the Du Pont company. Cultural anthropologist Kaori O’Connor argues that such myths help “to shape policy, at least tacitly if not overtly. The narrative may be uneven, veering in the case of DuPont from something very like a fairytale through moral fable, historical narrative, company hagiography, family history and back again.”^{Footnote 61} For Du Pont, the history of the family was the history of the company, and the history of the company was the history of the nation.

In 1951, the planning process for the celebration was headed by the 150th Anniversary Steering Committee, a joint effort by the director of Advertising, the director of the Employee Relations, and Glen Perry, assistant director of Du Pont public relations.^{Footnote 62} It was Perry who “suggested that an appropriate theme for the celebration is ‘Du Pont grows with the growing nation.’ This theme contained an opportunity to answer one of the difficult issues of the time, that of bigness in business, in reasonable and effective terms.”^{Footnote 63}

Here, it is clear how consciously Du Pont executives used conflated and constructed histories of company and nation to address the issue of antitrust cases by appealing to the necessity of American industry for the continued progress of the nation. For Du Pont executives, the best way to preserve liberty was by maintaining progress, especially within the industry. E.I. du Pont in the dramatization explained that “the day a man is satisfied with himself … or with the products he produces … on that day progress ends—and stagnation begins. I’ll never be satisfied … and I pray that all who follow me remain unsatisfied.”^{Footnote 64} This monologue established a vision of American society in which progress and liberty were understood as mutually beneficial forces. A bountiful society can only occur when a man is free to use his abilities and capacities to innovate and produce. In turn, the creation of new and better products extends a society’s freedoms. The goal of the dramatic reenactment was to impress on those present (and listening to the live broadcast) that in 1952—as in 1802—the corporate leader had a duty to improve on and provide the best quality of services. Thus, within this narrative of liberty, duty, and progress, Du Pont positioned itself as a good citizen because the company fulfilled its duty to the nation by providing goods and services.

This narrative is evidence of what historian Erik Christiansen argues was a larger Du Pont project in using history and myth to influence the definition of the national historical narrative. By incorporating nationalism and patriotism, the company used a conception of American history that supported its public culture in which government regulation was un-American, and thus unacceptable in America. Christiansen argues that it would be more appropriate to describe the dramatization as closer to heritage than history because heritage relies on myths, as opposed to facts, that endow a select group with prestige and common purpose.^{Footnote 65} To that end, Du Pont consistently used sponsored narratives that elevated E. I. and the company to a level of national importance. Within this founding myth, E. I. and the path he charted for the company were positioned as good and necessary parts of a national narrative that valued unfettered economic growth. His actions, behaviors, and beliefs were thus championed as crucial parts of the acceptable boundaries of an imagined nation.^{Footnote 66}

This founding story probably sounded familiar to many in attendance at the anniversary ceremony, as it had been the basis for the 1951 Du Pont-sponsored feature-length film, The Du Pont Story, screened for employees and circulated to the general public.^{Footnote 67} In fact, Hollywood actors Eduard Franz and Sigrid Gurie reprised their original roles of E. I. and Sophie, respectively, from the feature-length film for the anniversary ceremony. Highlighting the theme of “Du Pont grows with a growing nation,” the film emphasized how the company was established to fulfill the necessary and urgent needs of the new nation. The film delved into greater detail than did the anniversary prologue in linking the du Pont family to the founding of the American nation, particularly in a scene in which E. I. meets President Thomas Jefferson. In the film, and in other sources of official company history, E. I. and his father, Pierre Samuel, are described as Jefferson’s political confidantes since E. I.’s childhood in revolutionary France. Jefferson confided to the newly immigrated E. I. that the new nation faced international pressures, and thus Jefferson was uncomfortable with America’s complete reliance on European products, particularly gun powder, which was needed not only for defense but also for blasting, clearing farmlands, and building roads. E. I. explained that through innovative methods and the slow gathering of funds, he intended to fulfill America’s urgent need for gunpowder. To this, Jefferson explained America’s free enterprise system to E. I., thereby also explaining it to the film’s audience: “Money would be no problem in France I suppose. The state would doubtless supply the funds but here we believe our citizens should take the risks of industry and reap the rewards, if there are any.” E. I. replied that he had investors who believed in his project, and that together they were willing to risk the investment.^{Footnote 68} Du Pont executives, like the fictional narration of President Jefferson, espoused the ideal of a financial system consisting of just risks and rewards based on independent investments that benefited the nation, and the company, in the creation of useful and necessary products.

The use of Jefferson in the film explicitly tied the company to the birth of the new American nation, indicating that the company desired to be perceived as more than just the ambitions of a recent French immigrant. Rather, the company aimed to be understood as the personification of the American financial system and its promises of just rewards for just risks. Furthermore, Du Pont justified its claimed of being a vital American company by arguing that it had been fulfilling national needs from its founding, with the direct blessing from one of the founding fathers of the nation. In other words, the company always existed, and continued to exist, in order to serve the nation.

The 150th anniversary book, commissioned by the company and tellingly entitled Du Pont: The Autobiography of an American Enterprise, also mentions President Jefferson, again tying E. I. and his company to the American nation. In the book, Jefferson is said to have suggested the location of the gunpowder mills and gave E. I. his first order, which was to refine saltpeter.^{Footnote 69} To indicate that the Jefferson connection was enduring, the 200th anniversary book, published in 2002 and also commissioned by Du Pont, continued to portray Jefferson as friends of the du Pont family.^{Footnote 70} The 150th-anniversary book linked Du Pont to the history of America and indicated that the company was necessary, vital, and contributed to the overall well-being of the nation. O’Connor described the book as “a work of public culture—the way DuPont wished to be seen—that reflects a private culture, the way DuPont, family and company, saw itself.”^{Footnote 71} The foreword of the book summarized the corporate culture of the firm at mid-twentieth century:

This foreword, along with the rest of the autobiography, made the corporation’s intentions clear: Du Pont’s founding explicitly entwined the story of the company with the story of the nation. Echoing the sentiments contained in the anniversary celebration’s dramatic prologue, the book argued that the company was able to expand and prosper because of the nation’s commitment to freedom, and conversely that the nation’s growth and prosperity relied on the investments and innovations made by firms such as Du Pont. According to official company histories, E. I. founded Du Pont not to make profits but because he understood the needs of his adopted nation. He fulfilled those needs with skill and enterprise by providing high-quality gunpowder that was used for “hunting, land clearance, mining, quarrying, and self-protection.” In turn, the company continued E. I.’s legacy by fulfilling new needs as they arose, through research directed toward new high-quality and low-priced products.^{Footnote 73}

Anniversary as Public Culture

Thus far I have shown how Du Pont argued for its legitimacy by linking the company’s history with the history of America, and that the company continually justified its claims to good citizenship through the construction of a narrative that presented the firm as a useful and necessary institution, starting with the provision of products the growing nation needed, primarily gun powder. Internally, this narrative created a corporate culture that legitimized the company’s dominant position in the lives of employees and the nation’s social fabric. Du Pont also sought to correct misunderstandings about the American economic system more generally. In the process, it promoted a public culture that justified the necessity for both Du Pont and big business and discredited what the executives perceived as harmful and inaccurate antitrust attacks. Within this narrative, it was the titans of industry who were the heroes of American history, and the free enterprise system was the backdrop by which industry obtained the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

In his anniversary address, company president Crawford Greenewalt spoke directly to the antitrust attacks plaguing Du Pont in the postwar period. He took this time as an opportunity to articulate the socioeconomic system in which Du Pont operated and to explain why it was currently threatened. Greenewalt pointed to the nation’s unparalleled freedom “under which man was accountable only to his God and his conscience, so long as he did not infringe his neighbor’s equal rights,” and to the continued appeal for refugees and industrialists alike to come to America.^{Footnote 74} However, for Greenewalt, the meaning of freedom—the acceptance of responsibility, the right to self-determination, and the right to direct and employ energies as one saw fit—was under attack. Indeed, the “torch of freedom burns less brightly,” largely due to the harsh penalties of heavy taxation and state regulation that suffocated industrial initiative. When corporate initiative was stifled, all the nation suffered. Greenewalt was hopeful, though, and articulated his belief that should chemical research remain unregulated, its possibilities were limitless and America’s standard of living could expand “substantially beyond its present levels.” Indeed, “with freedom assured, there can be no limit to the progress we can make. The new continent we have before us has no boundaries. Its horizons are as broad and as limitless as the spirit and imagination. For us it is the opportunity of multiplying our national inheritance many times.” The freedom of unrestrained economic growth was once again conceived as part of the American nation’s history and as “the heritage of our forefathers.”^{Footnote 75}

According to Greenewalt, the standard of living could continue to rise only with an unfettered economy that rewarded individual initiative with incentives and did not restrict growth with penalties.^{Footnote 76} Once again, the anniversary book reintegrated the themes of the ceremony:

Thus, Du Pont’s public culture postured that business, not revolutionary politics, provided emancipatory power and social change.

The introductory editorial for the 1952 April/May issue of Du Pont Magazine, entitled “Foundations before Steeples,” reminded readers that tangible social gains were the direct result of American industry, not political organizing:

Historian Gary Cross positions the rise of consumerism as resulting from industrialization’s stifling of economic independence associated with preindustrial employment, such as artisans or farmers. In compensation for lack of control over the means of production, factory workers were rewarded with shorter hours, increased wages, more leisure time, and access to consumer goods. Industrial leaders framed these gains as reasonable alternatives to social unrest and radical organizing.^{Footnote 79}

An advertisement on the Du Pont-sponsored television show Du Pont Theatre, airing in the mid-1950s, championed a Du Pont-sanctioned vision of the American socioeconomic landscape, which supports Cross’s argument. The animated commercial contrasted the drudgery of early American settlers with the relative ease of contemporaneous, modern American families. It explained that America’s competitive business system ensured increased production, and thus better consumable goods. The commercial argued that, as compared with the low production and low wages of the 1900s, the average factory worker in the 1950s benefited from efficient and expensive machinery, which enabled him to produce more in less time than his forefathers. This was all accomplished with a shorter work week and higher wages, giving Americans “more leisure time to enjoy a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of anyone who lived half century ago.” The narrator of the commercial told audiences, “The more we produce, the more our families have to spend for the things they need and want: radios, cars, washing machines, refrigerators, and TV sets.” Audiences were also told that these labor-saving appliances and leisure devices were the benefits of a free enterprise system that created shorter hours, more efficient production, and higher wages.^{Footnote 80}

Reverberating Out: Corporate Culture Becomes Public Culture

The commercial was repurposed from the more expansive 1954 animated short film, entitled It’s Everybody’s Business. ^{Footnote 81} The film (described below) was cosponsored by Du Pont and the National Chamber of Commerce, and was based on the previously mentioned Du Pont employee economic training program, “How Our Business System Operates.” The goal of the film was to link American basic freedoms, such as freedom of speech and religion, to the American free enterprise system. It was first circulated among chambers of commerce members and then made available to civic groups. It was finally repackaged as an institutional advertisement, thereby circulating Du Pont’s public culture through various publics.

Indeed, the Du Pont Theatre commercial and subsequent short film are evidence of how messages intended for the Du Pont factory worker reverberated to wider audiences. Sixteen millimeter prints of the short film were rented or sold by the National Chamber of Commerce to business firms that gave them to educational institutions or were purchased directly by schools or colleges. Additional prints were made available for lending to schools and colleges. The public audience reportedly exceeded 10 million people; according to reports, almost half were high school pupils. In addition, local chambers of commerce and business firms aired the short film on local TV stations more than three hundred times, and the National Chamber arranged for network showings on all major networks (i.e., ABC, CBS, and NBC). The total television audience was estimated at more than 60 million people, and the National Chamber continued to promote and distribute the film to commercial theaters.^{Footnote 82}

Clearly, Du Pont’s message of an unfettered economy was not reserved for the Du Pont corporate family alone. Indeed, Brayman stated that although the corporate message was initially intended for the factory workers, it had a secondary effect with the general public.^{Footnote 83} Nye argues that because corporate messages are repeated often for the public, they can be understand “as an enormous incursion of private enterprise into the public and symbolic realm.”^{Footnote 84} Indeed, Du Pont messages entered into the public through widely circulated sponsored media, such as its anniversary book, commercial and short film, and employee and company magazines. By circulating factory messages to the general American public, Du Pont’s corporate culture became public culture. It negotiated “shared meaning among a diverse group of individuals” through the dissemination of its public culture.^{Footnote 85} Indeed, through repetition of the company’s mythic heritage, Du Pont created a “pattern of signs, symbols, languages, and codes through which such meanings [were] negotiated.”^{Footnote 86} The main meaning promoted was that American welfare was best determined by unfettered American business—not government regulation or organized labor—which was emblemized by the success of Du Pont.

The various audiences who encountered this sponsored media were treated to a thesis echoed in the anniversary celebration. The animated film begins in post-revolutionary America, a place conceived as a safe harbor for basic civil liberties as compared with the political oppression and religious persecutions in Europe. The narrator explained, “Our forefathers were constructing the foundation of this nation by interlocking inseparably the blocks of our political and economic freedoms.” These freedoms included the rights of worship, to go into business, to assembly, to work in a job of own’s choice, to bargain with an employer, to own property, and to the rewards gained through competition. Audiences followed the exploits of young Jonathon, an unskilled recent immigrant, who, through hard work and initiative, was able to start and maintain a profitable women’s hat business, thanks in large part to the basic liberties championed by the nation’s founders. The narrative then fast-forwards to the modern postwar factory, which was positioned in the narrative to have resulted from a competitive free enterprise system that rewarded risk and innovation.^{Footnote 87}

In addition to explaining to the viewers how the American business system operated, along with the benefits that citizens enjoyed because of it, the animated film detailed those forces that stood poised to shake the very foundation of the United States. In particular, it argued that government planning and high taxation, two necessary evils of the wartime economy, had persisted through peace time, cracking the very foundation of the American way of life and threatening basic liberties, such as the right to work in a job of own’s choice and to rewards through competition. Only after these controls are removed and basic freedoms repaired can the business system resume normal operation.^{Footnote 88} Reusing the arguments made in the anniversary materials, public audiences were told that an unfettered economy was the optimal economic system, allowing for the symbiotic relationship between liberty and progress and freedom and prosperity, and culminating in benefits for the entire American population.

This argument for the superiority and widespread benefits of America’s industrial might was prevalent in early twentieth-century advertising, a trope Marchand describes as the democracy of goods. When used in advertising, it indicates that all Americans, no matter their status, class, or wealth, could partake in the “the wonders of modern mass production” through the acquisition of cheap and readily available consumer goods. This film presented the trope as a vision of American society in which democracy was realized not as equal access to the vote but to consumer products.^{Footnote 89} The democracy of desire was commonly used throughout Du Pont-sponsored media, especially in the pages of Better Living, the glossy employee magazine. Steven Sheehan describes how “in hundreds of pictorial essays published in the magazine from 1946 to the early 1960s, the editors show[ed] Du Pont employees that they, and in fact all America’s workers, enjoyed a living standard far better than American workers had enjoyed in the past and far better than their contemporaries in other nations.”^{Footnote 90} Workers were effectively told that consumer capitalism was the source of American abundance, and that through hard work, workers could participate in the benefits of this public culture through the acquisition of consumer goods.^{Footnote 91}

For instance, the 1952 “Horn of Plenty,” an article linked to the anniversary celebration, described a typical Du Pont employee and his wife as they shopped in a Wilmington department store, and reaped “the Harvest of 150 years of steady industrial progress.” The article positioned the department store as the best representation of the impact industrial progress had on the lives of American citizens: “The vast bazaar of plenty in which every consumer may play the role of king every day.” Whereas in 1802 there was limited consumer choice, American industrialization at the turn of the century meant new tools increased output, which in turn increased productivity and worker earnings while drastically reducing the high prices of goods. In 1952 the average factory worker had access to a wide array of consumer goods, from lady’s hosiery and bathing suits to men’s drill presses and to household lighting fixtures.^{Footnote 92}

It is clear by the widespread use of these narratives of prosperity in print advertising, animated TV commercial, and publicly released short film that the Du Pont-endorsed company culture was not reserved for the factory community alone. For instance, the feature-length film described above, The Du Pont Story, was initially conceived to tell “the story of a typical American enterprise” and show the benefits of enterprise first to employees, stockholders, and customers, and then to the nation more generally.^{Footnote 93} This was “with the hope that those who see it will have a better understanding of the factors that have made our country the great one that it is.”^{Footnote 94} Free prints of both the full-length and shortened versions were made available for screenings at colleges and high schools, and before meetings of social, civic, and service clubs. A pamphlet describing these films noted that the “motion picture has proved as popular with members of scientific, civic, and service organizations as with students in colleges and high schools. It has been shown to students of economics, American industry, chemistry and engineering. It has been widely chosen also for student assembly screenings.”^{Footnote 95}

Between 1951 and 1952, Greenewalt began to respond to letters expressing gratitude that viewers had taken the time to write about their enjoyment of The Du Pont Story.^{Footnote 96} In 1953 the film garnered further praise when it and another Du Pont film (A Story of Research) were among ten industrial motion pictures to receive a Scholastic Teacher Magazine’s Award for Outstanding Merit. During the 1952–1953 school year, The Du Pont Story was shown to more than 1.1 million students, in addition to agricultural and rural groups, business and professional clubs, and television audiences. With these groups, and with early showings to employees and their families and friends, executives estimated that the film had been seen by about 5.5 million people.^{Footnote 97}