In 1974 two young academics, economist and New York Times columnist Leonard Silk and political scientist David Vogel, were hired to conduct a report on the ideas of business executives about the political condition of the United States. What they found was surprising: these apparent leaders of the American economy were in fact desperately anxious that most Americans hated them. After Watergate, Vietnam, the energy crisis, rising inflation, and unemployment, corporate leaders were terrified that they no longer enjoyed the easy support of the broad public. “Public acceptance of business has reached its lowest ebb in a generation,” one executive told them (15).

Much recent scholarship on the political economy of the late twentieth century has focused on the 1970s as a critical turning point. This was, many historians agree, the moment when the social accord that had governed American life since the end of World War II broke down. It was the decade when the economic dynamism of the United States shifted from manufacturing to finance and services, and the steady economic growth of the postwar period came to its close. Rapid inflation and rising unemployment were signals that the underlying terms of the postwar economy were changing. This economic uncertainty proved the perfect climate for the rise of the conservative movement, which had been taking shape for much of the postwar period but only in the 1970s proved capable of winning significant electoral victories.

Many scholars who have written about the decade have focused on its social, political, and cultural upheavals. By contrast, Benjamin Waterhouse’s remarkable Lobbying America, published in 2014, treats the reverberation of the shock waves of the 1970s as they affected American business executives. He argues that these elite figures were profoundly destabilized by the myriad challenges of the decade, political as well as economic, and that they sought to organize politically in response, reenergizing older business organizations and forming new ones, and developing new strategies to press their interests in Washington. Lobbying America is centered on three of these groups: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable, formed in 1972. These institutions “united corporate leaders from across industries and regions and formed the backbone of a powerful political coalition” (3). In the end, they were able to tap into “Americans’ longstanding ambivalence toward state power” and to reshape public debates on “regulation, taxation and fiscal power by the 1980s” (3).

Lobbying America charts the increasing political anxiety among executives regarding the political position of business in the 1970s, and their efforts to intervene in policy debates regarding inflation, consumer protection, regulatory reform, and tax cuts. It offers by far the fullest accounts to be found anywhere of the transformation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the decade, and, perhaps even more important, the formation of the Business Roundtable (Waterhouse had access to archival records privately held by the Roundtable, which are only intermittently available to historians, depending on leadership there). He carefully outlines the range of ideas and debate among organized business leaders regarding tax cuts in the 1970s—for many executives, the focus was on the “capital accumulation movement”: tax cuts that would focus less on income than on cuts that would foster new capital investment. Because of its rich immersion in primary archival work, the book is filled with insights and new evidence, setting it apart as one of the most valuable studies of the era—and indeed of business politics in the twentieth century more broadly.

Two elements of Waterhouse’s approach stand out in particular. The first is the way that he situates the business mobilization of the 1970s historically, in the unique nature of the corporate elite at that time. This was, as he points out, a primarily managerial and industrial elite—people whose working lives had taken shape in the relatively stable corporate hierarchies of postwar America, and who worked for the major manufacturing behemoths of the era. They were on edge in the 1970s not only because of the political critiques of the New Left or the emergence of new social regulations (Waterhouse highlights the reaction to the EPA and OSHA as key reasons for business alarm), but also because of rising international competition and deindustrialization. Waterhouse shows just how widespread the apocalyptic rhetoric and near-paranoid sentiments of the famous Powell Memorandum (in which the American Bar Association president and future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell warned that the “American economic system is under broad attack”) really were. Far from being a blueprint for action, Powell’s memo in fact summed up what was becoming common opinion at this point. Waterhouse suggests that a major reason these sentiments were so intense came in fact from the increasingly precarious economic position of these companies, and the fears of their leaders about the dangerous economic environment they confronted. By placing the weight here, he makes the arc of corporate mobilization far more historically specific than it is elsewhere in the literature.

The second notable aspect of Lobbying America is the way that Waterhouse extends his argument into the 1980s. The concerted corporate effort of the 1970s did not last. On the contrary, it fractured, so that even as Washington and the broader political culture might seem to have become more receptive to business, the actual coordinated political work that business groups were doing became more fraught and the “clout” they had been able to wield during the crisis years of the 1970s waned. Throughout Lobbying America, Waterhouse is attentive to the “limitations of business activism,” the difficulties that executives confronted in turning economic might into political power (3). He is also sensitive to the gaps between the priorities of the organized business groups and those of the conservative movement more generally—especially as the right turned more toward an entrepreneurial vision of business and toward individual tax cuts as a holy grail. By 1987, there were 7,200 registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C.; by contrast, in 1960 only 83 corporations retained Washington representatives, while there were 214 trade associations headquartered in the capital (248). Even as the weight of business had increased so dramatically, the power of any single organization—the Chamber or the Roundtable—had declined, as more and more of the lobbying efforts were focused on issues that affected particular companies and industries. “In an anxious world of fractured interests, conflicting policy visions, and high political stakes, looking out for one’s own proved a more appealing strategy than working collectively for a broader goal,” Waterhouse concludes (250).

One wonders whether this way of approaching the problem may accentuate the importance of the divisions that emerged, rather than highlighting the sustained ability to frame a coherent agenda. Waterhouse is also so focused on Washington and national political mobilization that he says little about the question of what might have been happening at the state and local levels (let alone in the workplace) is hardly touched on. Finally, he says little about the strike wave of the early 1970s and the increasingly serious antilabor offensive in the decade and after—an area in which there may have continued to be much more intense overlap of interests and effort than in trade or tax policy.

However, these are questions that other scholars will take up, many inspired by Waterhouse. By framing the business mobilization of the 1970s in such a careful and historically specific way—a distinct moment that had its origin and its conclusion—Waterhouse provides a powerful framework for thinking about the rightward shift in American politics at this time. He also offers a model for approaching the political mobilization of business, as something that has particular roots and takes specific organizational form, rather than as a historical constant. The result is a book that should be critical reading for any historian working on the 1970s and afterward—not only in business history but also in political, social, and intellectual history as well.