For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the historiography of postwar America was dominated by the idea of the “liberal consensus.” According to this narrative, the prosperous decades following the New Deal and the end of the Second World War constituted an era of social peace, during which labor and management tacitly agreed to put aside their differences and work together against their common enemy, the Soviet Union. The doctrine of growing GDP was substituted for that of class warfare. Corporate leaders made peace with the power of labor unions, as long as they agreed to acknowledge management rights, while unions abandoned their aspirations to truly broad-scale social transformation or revolution.Footnote ¹ As historian Godfrey Hodgson puts it, the postwar period was an “age of consensus,” during which “to dissent from the broad axioms” of agreement upon a liberal capitalism was “to proclaim oneself irresponsible or ignorant.”Footnote ² Hodgson and other scholars have argued that this liberal Cold-War consensus was ultimately constricted, limited, and conservative, that it was based on certain false assumptions about the inevitability of economic growth and social harmony in domestic politics and about the unity of Communism in international politics—which is why it ultimately fragmented and came apart in the 1960s. Nonetheless, the presumption is that such a consensus dominated the ruling circles of the nation throughout these postwar years.

The idea of the postwar consensus has deeply influenced historical understandings of the rise of the conservative movement and the decline of liberalism. A narrative of the postwar period that centers on the idea of the liberal consensus quite logically concludes that the rise of conservatism must primarily be understood in terms of its decline. Accordingly, postwar liberalism is thought to have dissolved under the cultural pressures and conflicts of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which became crystallized in struggles over the civil rights movement, feminism, abortion, the Vietnam War, busing, and school desegregation. The eruption of these tensions into national politics shattered the New Deal electoral coalition of Northern working-class whites, urban blacks, and Southerners. The increasing disaffection of ethnic whites from the Democratic Party and the mounting significance of cultural issues in politics ended the postwar consensus on economic matters as well, since the welfare state became entwined with racial politics. At the same time, slowing economic growth meant increased conflict among policymakers about the right way to guarantee prosperity.Footnote ³

The lasting power of the conservative movement has caused historians in recent years to begin to revisit the early history of the right. New attention has been paid to grassroots suburban activists, to organizations like the John Birch Society, and to early conservative political campaigns like that of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964.Footnote ⁴ Scholars have tended on the whole to emphasize a vision of the early conservatives as maverick intellectuals and activists who remained on the fringes of respectable debate (even if they were prosperous suburbanites and not themselves socially marginal) until the conflicts of the Vietnam era brought these outsiders into the mainstream.Footnote ⁵ But few historians have paid close attention to the role played by business conservatives in building the movement.Footnote ⁶

This essay contributes to the growing scholarship on the origins of the right and the 1950s consensus by arguing that the conservative political movement in the early postwar years won the support of a network of business leaders representing a wide variety of corporations who shared its basic worldview and aims, and some of whom, in fact, were genuine participants and activists in the conservative movement themselves. These conservative business-activists were at least as concerned with economic matters and questions of political economy as they were with anticommunism, Soviet espionage or foreign policy. Influenced by the work of intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, as well as by their own experiences with unions in the postwar era, the business conservatives feared the welfare state and the power of labor in the postwar United States, seeing liberalism as a step down the road to socialist serfdom. They used their financial resources to push forwards the conservative movement in the United States at a moment when broad public support for the aims of rolling back the welfare state and weakening unions was low, and at a moment when neither political party was committed to these goals. The economic agenda of the business conservatives would not win popular support in electoral politics on the national level until 1980, when politicians like Ronald Reagan successfully connected the free-market economic agenda to a broader cultural conservatism. But the populist backlash against the civil rights, antiwar, feminist and gay rights movements of the late 1960s ultimately became joined to conservative economic politics in large part because the business conservatives had been able to shape a politics of opposition to government and union power throughout the postwar period.Footnote ⁷

In his recent essay summarizing the literature of the conservative movement, historian David Chappell has called for a deeper study of the role of money in building conservative politics: “[M]oney provided conservative strategists the luxury to explore every angle of attack, breed a variety of attackers, and develop resilient institutions . … Money, and the organization and self-confidence it helped to buy, were keys to the right's increasing prominence in American culture.”Footnote ⁸ Understanding the role of the busines activists in the rise of the conservative movement can help us see the elite as well as the grassroots dimensions of conservatism. But looking at the emergence of a community of conservative businessmen during the 1950s can also help us to rethink the trajectory of postwar American political history. Instead of seeing the narrative in terms of the rise and decline of consensus, in which cultural conflicts shatter shared assumptions about economics, we can instead see a period of continued struggle over the political economy of postwar liberalism, in which some part of the larger business community remained engaged in finding ways to undermine unions and build an intellectual opposition to liberalism throughout the entire postwar period. This is not to say that there was nothing unique about the political economy of the middle decades of the twentieth century. Because of the strength of labor unions and the state after the Second World War, and the agreement of the political parties on the basic conditions of New Deal liberalism, even the business conservatives had to deal with labor unions and the welfare state.Footnote ⁹ But a standoff is different from a true consensus. This essay will look at the emergence of this community of politically-driven conservative businessmen during the 1950s, examining its development in three realms that the business-activists themselves saw as closely connected: the world of conservative think tanks, that of labor relations, and finally the entrance of the movement into electoral politics through the right-to-work campaigns of 1958 and the promotion of Barry Goldwater as a presidential candidate in 1960 and 1964.Footnote ¹⁰

Historian Robert Griffith has described the ideal of a “corporate commonwealth,” held by Dwight D. Eisenhower but shared by business leaders around institutions such as the Committee for Economic Development and the Advertising Council during the 1950s.Footnote ¹¹ This was a vision of a modern capitalist society that was free of intense social or class conflict, in which business shared its power with the state and even with responsible labor union leaders. It went beyond pragmatic acceptance of the successes of the New Deal, to an active embrace of government's ability to mediate social conflicts. Eisenhower criticized business leaders for what he saw as their shortsightedness. In a 1948 speech at Columbia University, he told the audience, “[D]anger arises from too great a concentration of power in the hands of any individual or group: The power of concentrated finance, the power of selfish pressure groups, the power of any class organized in opposition to the whole—any one of these, when allowed to dominate is fully capable of destroying individual freedom.”Footnote ¹² Public-spirited and civic-minded leaders were needed in order to adjudicate conflicts between self-interested actors and prevent the outbreak of depression or of violent conflict. Eisenhower sought to involve businessmen closely in his administration—by working with the Advertising Council to organize public relations campaigns to halt recessions; by inviting corporate leaders to the White House for dinner parties; by including them in his cabinet—but he remained wary about the corporate sector as potentially self-interested and therefore incapable of exercising leadership in the public interest. Organizations like the CED and the Advertising Council, while more confident about the public spirit of industry, also put forward positions for business that emphasized cooperation with the government, and the positive role the state could play in regulating the national economy using Keynesian principles.Footnote ¹³

The business conservatives of the 1950s formulated their politics against the backdrop of this vision of a “corporate commonwealth.” While mid-sized manufacturers played an important role, no single typology covers the range of businessmen that participated in the movement. Like the corporate liberals, they were a diverse group, covering a range of industries, companies, and sectors—large companies as well as mid-sized and small, Northern and Midwestern as well as Southern (to the extent that that is a meaningful divide at a time when many Northern manufacturers were moving South), large national companies like General Electric and smaller firms like Lone Star Steel.Footnote ¹⁴ They were unified less by industrial type than by their conviction that the postwar order was not the stable commonwealth imagined by Eisenhower, and that the reforms of the New Deal era had resulted in an economy imbalanced in favor of organized labor, as well as an expansive and growing state. In their view, the institutionalization of labor unions meant continued pressure for the expansion of the welfare state, in addition to industrial disturbances such as strikes. In short, they rejected Eisenhower's vision of a commonwealth carefully adjudicating conflicts between business and other social groups, arguing instead that the power of business had been dangerously limited, and that it needed to be carefully rebuilt in order to counter the threatening power of labor unions and the state.Footnote ¹⁵

The roots of modern business conservatism lay in the 1930s, in the reaction of the business community against the transformations of the New Deal.Footnote ¹⁶ After an initial period of tentative cooperation with the Roosevelt administration, many business leaders rejected the New Deal and began to openly organize against it. The American Liberty League, heavily supported by the Du Pont family and other businessmen, kept up a steady stream of pamphlets and speeches intended to discredit the New Deal.Footnote ¹⁷ The National Association of Manufacturers, which during the New Deal transformed itself from a group dominated by small Southern textile companies to one representing major industrial concerns, pumped large sums of money into public relations campaigns—using films, comic books, pamphlets, radio, paid advertisements, and other media—on behalf of free enterprise itself.Footnote ¹⁸ Nor did the business conservatives come to peace with the New Deal economic order as a result of the economic recovery that came about during the Second World War. Although the NAM relaxed its stringent opposition to the Wagner Act after the war, business organizing efforts gained new life after the massive strike wave of 1946, and the organization spent $3 million lobbying for the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which Business Week described as a “New Deal for America's Employers.”Footnote ¹⁹ As Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has shown, NAM campaigns continued with great vigor in the postwar period, as the organization churned out reams of literature (8 million pamphlets in 1950), produced radio and television programs, and held meetings for industrialists to equip them to act as spokesmen for free enterprise.Footnote ²⁰ Other business organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce, the Advertising Council and the CED also engaged in campaigns on behalf of free enterprise, as did trade associations and individual companies. According to an estimate by Fortune editor William Whyte, by 1952 American companies were spending $100 million a year in an effort to sell the idea of capitalism to the American public.Footnote ²¹

Early in the postwar period, however, a newly-sophisticated range of groups devoted to influencing intellectual culture and spreading the ideas of the free market began to appear. Many of them were funded and organized by men (women played a very minor role in the circles of 1950s business conservatism) who had been part of the political struggles of the 1930s, yet they were distinct from these earlier efforts. The new think tanks sought to advance a critique of the power of labor unions and of the welfare state, and to develop a sophisticated free-market theory that could show why protecting free enterprise was best for everyone in society, not only for business. In contrast to NAM, they tried to find new ways to bring their ideas to the attention of elite groups, such as journalists and politicians, instead of conducting broader public-relations campaigns. These think-tank organizations frequently rejected explicit association with business, seeking to attain the appearance of neutral objectivity even as they relied heavily upon business contributions and as they tried to develop a politics organized around the idea of the free market.

The American Enterprise Association (AEA), which relied from its inception on wide support from American corporations, was one of the foremost of the new think tanks.Footnote ²² Founded in 1943 by Lewis H. Brown, the chairman of the Johns-Mansville Corporation (a major insulation and roofing company), the organization took as its major project creating legislative analyses and economic reports that reflected a business-friendly viewpoint and distributing them to congressional leaders. Its slogan (adopted in the mid-1950s) was, “A Business Investment in Good Legislation.”Footnote ²³ In its early years, the organization floundered. A Congressional investigation in 1950 found that the AEA violated federal antilobbying laws, pointing out that while it pretended to offer objective analysis, the group actually received all its financial support from major corporations.Footnote ²⁴ While Congress did not penalize the AEA, the organization's legitimacy was seriously challenged, and contributions to the group slowed.

A couple of years after the election of Eisenhower, however, the few remaining trustees of the AEA decided to bring the organization back to life. Allen Marshall, an executive at General Electric (shortly after taking the reins at AEA, he moved to the weapons manufacturer General Dynamics), took over the presidency of the group. To run the organization's daily affairs, Marshall hired William J. Baroody, Sr., a friend from the Chamber of Commerce Committee on Economic Security. Baroody's role as a “policy entrepreneur” and his work building AEA as an intellectual institution has been noted by previous historians.Footnote ²⁵ But Baroody also cultivated donors with assiduous care. He used personal and professional business networks to revive fundraising for AEA, contacting old donors and reaching out to companies which he thought likely to be interested in AEA's message, and encouraging donors and supportive executives to reach out to their friends. (For example, in 1957 one retired GM executive wrote to a vice-president of Gulf Oil, reminding him that AEA got contributions from “many of the largest” corporations in the country, including GM.)Footnote ²⁶ The trustees that Baroody selected, like the donors, represented many different kinds of companies, including such figures over the course of the decade as the treasurer of Coca-Cola, the chairman of Colgate-Palmolive, the finance chair of Eli Lilly, and the general counsel of Socony-Mobil Oil Company.Footnote ²⁷ Strategizing with Allen Marshall, Baroody argued that adding “more top-notch men to the Board of Trustees” would impress the titans of the corporate world and thus help with fundraising.Footnote ²⁸ By 1958, AEA received contributions from twenty-six of the fifty largest industrial corporations in the economy, and the organization hoped to grow still more by “mak[ing] certain that member companies and prospective member companies” had a thorough understanding of how the AEA worked.Footnote ²⁹ In 1962, AEA received donations of $10,000 or more from companies like Allen-Bradley, Ford, General Motors, General Electric, Socony Mobil, and U.S. Steel (as well as corporate foundations like the Kresge Foundation and the Lilly Endowment), along with smaller donations from companies like Procter & Gamble, Armstrong Cork, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube.Footnote ³⁰

Although AEA eschewed openly partisan politics, the group saw itself as engaged in a struggle against “the more or less steady trend toward a controlled economy … and away from free, competitive enterprise,” which it sought to counter through the careful cultivation of conservative ideas. As Baroody wrote to one supporter, “I … have long been convinced that the climate of a particular society is, to a substantial degree, the product of ideas emanating from its thought leaders—and ideas are the most powerful of forces.”Footnote ³¹ The organization worked hard to get its bill analyses and reports into the hands of staffers on Capitol Hill. Thanks to the support of conservative politicians like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and Wisconsin Senator Melvin Laird, as well as Eisenhower's Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, an early president of AEA, by the end of the 1950s Baroody could claim that nearly seventy-five percent of Representatives and eighty-four percent of Senators received the organization's reports.Footnote ³² AEA publications also got coverage in the mainstream press. For example, in 1954 the AEA released a study on agricultural price supports by economist Karl Brandt, which was promptly picked up by the Wall Street Journal and reported on in Newsweek.Footnote ³³Fortune magazine covered an AEA report on labor unions without even mentioning that AEA had anything to do with it.Footnote ³⁴ The group provided expert witnesses to testify in Congressional hearings; for example, in 1959, Wilbur Mills invited the Association to send someone to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on federal income tax reform.Footnote ³⁵ Business conservatives saw such chances to give testimony as an opportunity to build the careers of conservative intellectuals; as one GE executive, Peter Steele, commented, going to Washington on an all-expenses-paid trip would help to increase the “prestige given the consulting economist on his home campus.”Footnote ³⁶ The AEA cultivated an elaborate network of relationships among conservative intellectuals, businessmen, politicians, and journalists, marshalling their resources towards achieving a common set of political goals.

The AEA was but one organization in a range of conservative intellectual groups that were funded by many of the same corporations. Spiritual Mobilization, a group devoted to reviving the ideals of the free market in the religious community, sought to cultivate business support for a program of revitalizing market loyalties among the nation's clergy. “Business leadership cannot afford to leave the molding of moral, economic and political climate in the religious field to those whose growth in power … can be seen to carry the most serious consequences for society and for the security and vitality of business enterprise,” read one fundraising appeal.Footnote ³⁷ The group won financial support from companies that included the Carnation Company, Colgate-Palmolive, Firestone Tire and Rubber, General Motors, Gulf Oil, Republic Steel, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, Sun Oil, and U.S. Steel.Footnote ³⁸ The Mont Pelerin Society, an esoteric intellectual organization founded by Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek in 1947, received contributions from the Volker Fund, a Midwestern foundation that dispensed the wealth of one Kansas City furniture manufacturer, and of Jasper Crane, a retired Du Pont executive who strenuously raised money to fund an American meeting of the group in 1958, winning contributions from executives at such firms as U.S. Steel and the United Fruit Company.Footnote ³⁹ Even the proudly independent National Review relied financially upon donations from figures such as Morton Salt magnate Sterling Morton of Chicago, who had helped organize the Industrial Division of the Landon campaign against Roosevelt in 1936.Footnote ⁴⁰

Supported financially by conservatives in the business community, some of whom became members themselves of groups such as Mont Pelerin, the free-market think tanks helped to create a body of ideas and research that could be used to challenge the central faiths of liberalism. As Crane wrote in one of his fundraising letters on behalf of Mont Pelerin, “What the highbrows upstairs talk about today has such a decisive influence on the public opinion of tomorrow.”Footnote ⁴¹ The ideology of these think tanks and intellectual organizations was focused closely on the free market, not simply on international anticommunism. As William F. Buckley wrote in his initial prospectus for National Review, his new magazine would focus especially on “the inroads upon the market economy caused by monopolies in general, and politically oriented unionism in particular; and it will tell the violated businessman's side of the story.”Footnote ⁴² The activists were eager to win the loyalty of business, and conservative businessmen were committed in turn to helping the new organizations grow and thrive. The organizers of the conservative movement in the 1950s never felt that businessmen were doing enough to help them; they frequently complained of the difficulties they confronted in winning business support. But nonetheless they were able to get enough financial contributions to start to build a network of conservative intellectual institutions.

The free-market think tanks and conservative publications produced reports, papers, and editorials on a wide range of topics related to political economy, but one of their foremost concerns was always the power of labor unions in the modern American economy. From the standpoint of the free-market intellectuals, labor unions represented a monopoly on labor—a monopoly, they argued, that was often sustained through coercion or violence—and hence an interference with the free market. Unions, as Friedrich Hayek wrote, were “using their power in a manner which tends to make the market system ineffective and which, at the same time, gives them a control of the direction of economic activity that would be dangerous in the hands of government but is intolerable if exercised by a particular group.”Footnote ⁴³ The AEA commissioned a series of reports in the 1950s devoted to an investigation of the “power position of labor,” which focused especially on the idea that unions exercised monopoly power in the hopes of rallying antimonopoly sentiment (“the anti-monopoly tradition is one of the most powerful influences in American life,” began one internal memo about the research program).Footnote ⁴⁴ Such ideas were widely shared within the community of businessmen who funded the free-market intellectual organizations. As B.E. Hutchinson, a retired Chrysler executive who was a strong supporter of Spiritual Mobilization (and the Foundation for Economic Education, another free-market group), wrote to a friend in 1955, “Long acquaintance with and active participation in industrial relations leaves me with the conviction that the real cornerstone of the American labor movement without which it could not exist and operate is sheer, stark terrorism.”Footnote ⁴⁵

While the think-tank intellectuals and free-market economists were not setting labor policy at American corporations, their ideas provided a powerful justification for managements that wanted to resist unions at their own companies. During the Eisenhower years, the National Labor Relations Board issued a series of decisions that greatly expanded the prerogatives of management during union organizing drives, allowing employers to campaign directly against unions.Footnote ⁴⁶ The result was a vast expansion in the tactics that companies used to wield their economic power in ways that made it far harder for their employees to organize. In the late 1950s, the NAM began to serve as a clearinghouse for antiunion strategies, instructing corporations on techniques that they could use to stop workers from organizing. The organization created compilations of antiunion materials (letters, leaflets, and speeches) that employers could use in their own antiunion campaigns, as well as the “Suggested Outline of Possible Problems Confronting the Employer when Faced with an Organizing Drive,” which recommended that managers hold group meetings, send letters to the homes of workers, and meet with workers one-on-one over the course of “the Campaign.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Such strategies in practice had the effect of making workers feel pressured and threatened by their employers, as though supporting a union could jeopardize their jobs. The types of strategies encouraged by NAM—which were also disseminated by men like Nathaniel Shefferman of Labor Research Associates, a Sears and Roebuck-founded antiunion consulting firm—proved remarkably effective. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of unfair labor practice cases filed against employers increased sharply; the number of charges filed against employers for illegally discharging workers during union campaigns nearly doubled. The number of union victories in NLRB-supervised elections began to fall.Footnote ⁴⁸ While the intellectuals working at conservative think tanks did not themselves craft these strategies, their critique of labor's power may have helped to embolden employers who might otherwise have been more willing to negotiate with unions.

Among the most notable examples of this new trend was the protracted strike at the Kohler Company, where a degree of management hostility to labor reminiscent of pre-Wagner Act days met with resounding support from the growing community of business conservatives, to the great surprise of the United Auto Workers, the union organizing at the company. In 1954, the Kohler Company—a mid-sized Wisconsin manufacturer of plumbing goods, known for its historic resistance to unionism—embarked upon an intense campaign against the UAW, which had won an election at the company in 1952. Workers at the plant went on strike after the Kohler management refused to agree to a contract containing provisions for arbitration of grievances, seniority, and a union shop that were entirely typical for the mid-1950s. They did not return to work for years, as the Kohler management stubbornly refused to budge, until in 1960 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the company was guilty of unfair labor practices (the company continued to appeal for several additional years, and the conflict was completely settled only in 1965). From the standpoint of the union, the Kohler Company was an irretrievable throwback, an enclave of feudalism and paternalism stuck in the ugly past of American labor relations.Footnote ⁴⁹

But the company drew its strength and staying power from the resurgence of antiunion feeling among business conservatives. Throughout the strike, the will of the Kohler Company was bolstered by conservative intellectuals and by raucous audiences of business supporters. The strike was seen as a heroic and noble stand against labor's power. As Sterling Morton (of the Chicago-based Morton Salt Company) wrote to William F. Buckley, “It is significant that the resolute fight against the CIO and its goons is being made by a family-owned business in a small town in Wisconsin … The big automobile companies are run by professional managers, who will never battle for basic principles.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Members of the Kohler management became regulars on the business lecture circuit, speaking to audiences including the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the DePaul University Club, the Economic Club of Detroit, the Minnesota Bar Association, the Florida State Chamber of Commerce, the Associated Industries of Alabama, Vermont, Georgia, and Oshkosh, the Executives Club of Chicago, the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, the Advertising Club of Milwaukee, the Industrial Relations Association of Wisconsin, the Alabama Cotton Manufacturers Association, the Vermont Farm Bureau, and the American Mining Congress, as well as a local chapter of the National Association of Accountants.Footnote ⁵¹ Kohler managers funded National Review, raised money for the Manion Forum and the Young Americans for Freedom, and participated in the right-to-work movement.Footnote ⁵² And in 1958, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater vaulted himself to a position of national prominence by forcing the Kohler Strike before the Senate Committee on Improprieties in Labor and Management, and hauling none other than UAW president Walter Reuther in to testify before the Senate.Footnote ⁵³ Herbert Kohler supported radio host Clarence Manion's attempts to persuade Barry Goldwater to run for president in 1960. The Kohler strike, in short, was inextricably linked to the developing conservative movement, as Kohler and other company managers became rallying points for the movement as a whole, while lending their material support to help it grow.

Kohler was, of course, a small family-owned manufacturer with a long history of fighting labor unions that had had a company union until workers voted for the UAW in 1952. Many large industrial employers that unions had organized during the New Deal years—like Ford, U.S. Steel or General Motors—cultivated cordial relationships with their unions, even if they also gave money to groups like AEA. But not all major unionized manufacturers did so. General Electric, at the time the third-largest employer in the country, was one of the most aggressively antiunion companies in industry during the 1950s.Footnote ⁵⁴ Following the company's experience in the 1946 strike wave, when the entire corporation was shut down by the United Electrical Workers, chief executive Charles E. Wilson put a Kentucky-born marketing executive named Lemuel Boulware in charge of labor relations at the company.Footnote ⁵⁵ (Previously, Boulware had been responsible for labor relations at GE's affiliated companies, which did not participate in the strike.) While Boulware was the architect of the company's policies, the top management of GE backed him up. Boulware created an elaborate program of labor relations. Part of this was a tough negotiating strategy. Instead of actively engaging in the back-and-forth of bargaining, the company would prepare its offer independently (doing “careful research,” including “analysis of union demands, as publicized before negotiations”) and then present it to the union as a final offer (although GE always said that it would modify its proposal if the union provided “new information”). Through this strategy, the company sought to deny “the union the political victory of appearing to force the company to accede to union demands, or at least to seek a compromise satisfactory to the union.”Footnote ⁵⁶

At the same time, Boulware directed a nearly constant stream of propaganda at GE workers, all designed to reinforce the message that the company was powerful and beneficent while the union was weak. Boulware was deeply influenced by writers like von Hayek and von Mises, whose books he owned. As he wrote in one of his first memos at GE, circulated even before the 1946 strike, “Management is in a sales campaign to determine who will run business and the country, and to determine if business and the country will be run right … Who has been winning this sales competition for 13 years, and who still is, is all too evident in elections, labor laws, the attitude of all public servants, and the convictions held by workmen and the public about management.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Boulware sought to weaken workers' sympathies to the union and bolster their loyalty to the company through an elaborate communications program, including in addition to numerous corporate publications an economics class on company time for all 190,000 employees at GE. He also encouraged the formation of book groups to study an economics text specially commissioned by the company, and encouraged managers to read and study the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and conservative economics texts like Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.Footnote ⁵⁸ Even as the company tried to demonstrate the beneficence of the market's power to its employees, though, GE began to shut down its factories in Northern states and move to Southern states with right-to-work laws and without unions.Footnote ⁵⁹ General Electric also adopted a hard line against communists, firing workers who admitted that they were communists or who could not absolve themselves of charges that they were connected to the Communist Party. Despite the company's anticommunist politics, however, for Boulware, the radical-led United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the anticommunist International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE) were equally dangerous. As he liked to proclaim in one of his trademark speeches, “Our real danger is that, while we are scared to death of communism, too many of us seemingly haven't come to fear socialism at all.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The activities of Boulware at GE may have helped embolden other companies to try to resist their unions. The recession of the late 1950s provided extra incentives to find new ways to cut costs. Reporting on the downward profit trend, in an article entitled “Management's No. 1 Worry,” Business Week argued that “labor costs—direct and indirect—are universally cited as the chief cause of the profits decline.”Footnote ⁶¹ In steel, in many ways the emblem of labor-management cooperation in the 1950s, the small steel companies were the first to break out of the standard pattern of labor relations. A small Texas firm named Lone Star Steel provoked a wildcat strike and then fired all its workers in early 1957 and hired replacements in a blatant attempt to break the union. Timkin Roller Bearings then tried to refuse to bargain over fringe benefits. And in 1959, U.S. Steel took a 116-day strike (which it lost) in an effort to change work-rule provisions in the contract in ways that would benefit the company.Footnote ⁶²

At GE itself, Boulware's strategies were tested in 1960, when the electrical workers in the IUE went out on strike, in part to win better protections against company shutdowns.Footnote ⁶³ GE insisted that it would stay open during the strike, recruiting workers to cross picket lines through phone calls and home visits. The strike ended in abject defeat for the union within a few weeks, as the workers voted to accept a contract identical to that which they had originally struck to reject.Footnote ⁶⁴ It was, as New York Times labor reporter A.H. Raskin put it, “the worst setback any union has received in a nationwide strike since World War II.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The strike brought Boulware a new level of media attention. He received supportive coverage in the Wall Street Journal and (a few years later) Harvard Business Review.Footnote ⁶⁶ Admirers wrote to Boulware congratulating him and asking his secrets.Footnote ⁶⁷ He began to make speaking junkets (going, for example, to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to advise Roger Milliken).Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet Boulware believed firmly that his work in labor relations at GE was only one part of a much larger struggle. He always thought that politics, not labor relations, was what really needed to change. In 1958, in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, he first praised the business community for the state's right-to-work law, and then urged business leaders to take politics more seriously, to equip themselves to meet “the new and unfamiliar managerial requirements in connection with the political problems of such constantly mounting importance.”Footnote ⁶⁹ One friend to wrote to him after the 1960 strike congratulated him on the success of Boulwarism, and then added, “Perfect it for politics and USA will be saved.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In some ways, the fate of Boulwarism itself indicated the paramount importance of politics: in 1964, the National Labor Relations Board found that GE violated the mandate to bargain in good faith—citing not only its contract negotiating strategy, but the company's entire program of corporate relations, as evidence of its bad-faith bargaining.Footnote ⁷¹ Without the support of the state, management's power would always be constrained. No one learned that lesson better than Ronald Reagan, who worked at the company during the years that Boulware's program was at its peak, traveling from plant to plant and giving talks to the workers about the free market, while he also visited local Chambers of Commerce and Rotary clubs in GE towns. Reagan, whose vision of the market took shape over his years at GE, became one of Boulware's favorite politicians in later years, while Reagan remained a loyal admirer of Boulware's as well.Footnote ⁷²

In the late 1950s, the loose community of conservative businessmen that had emerged over the decade began to enter into electoral politics. The debate among business conservatives about finding ways to influence electoral politics was in part a response to the 1955 merger of the AFL and the CIO, and the business community's growing awareness of the labor federation's Committee on Political Education (COPE).Footnote ⁷³ The specter of an organization of labor unions with the ability to raise money, lobby candidates, and turn workers out to the polls was deeply disturbing to business conservatives. As one GE manager wrote in a 1959 book entitled The Businessman's Guide to Practical Politics, “American businessmen—both large and small—had better become aware of the dangers to our business system toward which COPE is directing its activities.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In some cases, business conservatives described labor's mobilization as a model for business. Like the unions, declared Charles Sligh, the executive vice-president of the NAM, business needed to “take an interest in politics … undertake to understand politics … [a]nd then we must work like Trojans in politics.”Footnote ⁷⁵

One of the first organizational efforts in the business community was the Effective Citizens Organization (ECO), an organization founded in 1955 by a young Republican strategist named F. Clifton White who would later become famous as the tactical architect of the 1964 Goldwater campaign. ECO trained businessmen in the arcane minutiae of local politics, teaching them how to conduct petition drives or the structure for picking delegates to a political convention. The strategy behind groups like ECO was to find a way to mobilize businessmen so that they could confront the power of unions in electoral politics. As White wrote in his memoir years later, “One of my main concerns at that time was that businessmen, for the most part, did not understand politics and the mechanics of the political system, while the unions did … . [T]he lack of political activism in the business community created an imbalance in favor of the unions, and I decided to do something about it.”Footnote ⁷⁶

A year after ECO was founded a vice-president at GE asked the firm to come set up a seminar program. Soon ECO was setting up public affairs seminars for businesses all through the Midwest.Footnote ⁷⁷ The United States Chamber of Commerce began to run similar seminar programs, and a number of companies (including Johnson & Johnson, Ford, and the American Can Company) started their own programs. Chain stores like S.S. Kresge issued pronouncements to all local Chambers of Commerce, asking them to adopt the US Chamber's course in practical politics. Union Carbide, New Jersey Bell Telephone, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Prudential Insurance Company all began to use their company publications to tout political issues and report on the political involvement of employees (Chase even gave citations to staff members for their political and civic activities).Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1958, Fortune trumpeted the good news: the American corporation had “rediscovered” politics.Footnote ⁷⁹

The right-to-work campaigns of 1958 embodied the first major push of business into the world of political campaigning. Inspired by the successful passage of a right-to-work law in Indiana in 1957, business-led coalitions in six states—Washington, Kansas, California, Idaho, Colorado, and Ohio—tried to win right-to-work legislation. It seemed like the perfect issue: it defined unions as the oppressors of workers, trying to deny them the “right to work.” As one small manufacturer wrote to the NAM in 1954, “The right to work issue is by far the best battleground which management has been presented with, on which to fight out whether or not the country is going to fall all the way into the grasp of the unions.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Business activists set up committees, worked with the National Right-to-Work Committee (itself founded in 1955), and networked through local Chambers of Commerce.Footnote ⁸¹ In Kansas, where right-to-work passed after four years of struggle, Reed Larson, the leader of the campaign, attributed the victory to the active participation of business leaders in the drive; for example, the president of Boeing wrote a letter to Boeing employees, proclaiming his strong belief in the principles of right-to-work.Footnote ⁸²

Although Kansas was the only state where right-to-work passed in 1958, even where the campaigns failed they brought together conservative businessmen and helped to strengthen political networks.Footnote ⁸³ The most stinging of the 1958 defeats came in California, where the gubernatorial campaign of Senator William F. Knowland was linked to the right-to-work cause. Knowland decided to run for the governorship of California in 1958 even though it meant that he would have to first win the Republican nomination away from incumbent Goodwin Knight, a liberal Republican. Knowland, an ardent Cold Warrior who wrote an article for the inaugural issue of National Review, decided to make right-to-work the central issue of his campaign in part in order to differentiate himself from Knight, who had good relationships with unions.Footnote ⁸⁴ Knowland won considerable support from California businessmen as a result of his choice to support right-to-work legislation. Figures such as Cy Rubel of Union Oil, Charles Jones of the Richfield Oil Company, and Harold Quinton of the Southern California Edison Company had wanted for a while to see a right-to-work campaign in California.Footnote ⁸⁵ As one Napa County farmer wrote to the campaign office, “The right to work issue and the need to stabilize the state government in the hands of free enterprise proponent have a sweet taste in the mouths of thousands of our conservative Napa County farmers and business pioneers.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The Knowland campaign attracted support from out-of-state businessmen, who saw its potential significance in national politics. J. Howard Pew and his family gave $10,000.Footnote ⁸⁷ Smaller businessmen across the nation even started chain letters asking for contributions of $1 or $2 each to build up a fund to support Knowland, arguing that the election was important because of the “national implication of whether a candidate, who dares to condemn the monopolistic power of unions, can be elected to high office.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Lemuel Boulware delivered a speech at the Los Angeles Rotary Club where he “practically brought the house down” after commending Knowland's courage for running on right-to-work.Footnote ⁸⁹

But few working-class California voters were moved by right-to-work. The co-chair of the campaign in Santa Clara County reported to the campaign headquarters that he had spoken to many “truck drivers, bakery employees, butchers, bartenders, service station operators, machinists, electricians,” and found that “without exception, all are opposed to the so-called Right to Work—they do not understand the entire problem—they think only that if such a law went into effect that no one would belong to the Union … . [t]hey feel Knowland is 100% against labor.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Another grassroots Republican wrote to the campaign office about a Lockheed Martin employee who had told him, “Knowland is a good man all right, but he's out to ruin the unions. I got a wife and four kids. I have to vote for a Democrat.”Footnote ⁹¹ While the occasional “rank-and-file” unionist wrote to Knowland to express support for the right-to-work program, in the end, Knowland lost by more than a million votes.Footnote ⁹² From the standpoint of the business conservatives who had funded his campaign and helped to drive it forwards, though, the movement had been successful in many respects: it had helped to solidify support in the California business community for a political program opposing labor. As Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille (a major supporter of right-to-work laws) wrote to a critic of Knowland's in the Republican Party in the summer of 1958, “There was very little glory for the Republican Party officials in 1856, when the party first went into national politics, and was defeated. But four years later the party gave Lincoln to America.”Footnote ⁹³ Many of the Knowland backers continued to be conservative activists in California politics. When Ronald Reagan ran for the governor's seat in 1966, the four businessmen who approached him and persuaded him to run (Cy Rubel, Henry Salvatori, Edward Mills, and Holmes Tuttle) had all been fundraisers for the Knowland campaign eight years before, and thirty of the initial forty-two members of Reagan's southern California fundraising team had been major contributors to the right-to-work effort.Footnote ⁹⁴

The network of business conservatives that had been created by the late 1950s was strong enough to propel forwards Barry Goldwater as a national political figure. Nearly every major figure in Goldwater's presidential campaigns had been active in the antilabor and free-market political circles of the earlier decade. As Rick Perlstein has shown in his work on Goldwater, the abortive 1960 campaign was launched by a tiny number of conservative businessmen, led by Clarence Manion, a radio talk show host who dug into the mailing lists of the businessmen who funded his show to drum up support for Goldwater. In 1963 and 1964, F. Clifton White used the political connections he had made through ECO to build a campaign to draft Goldwater for the Republican nomination. The intellectual development fostered by the think tanks paid off, too: Milton Friedman came on board to advise the campaign on economic matters, and wrote a lengthy treatise on Goldwater's economics in the New York Times Magazine a few months before the election. William Baroody danced on the fine edge of nonprofit law and donated his own time and that of American Enterprise Association staff members to the Goldwater campaign, providing research, analysis, and a steady stream of conservative economic ideas. And former GE employee Ronald Reagan came to national prominence following his televised speech in late October before the election.Footnote ⁹⁵ Many CEOs of large corporations ultimately pledged their support to Johnson over the summer and fall of 1964, as Goldwater's campaign began to look increasingly quixotic, and of course the campaign itself went down in defeat.Footnote ⁹⁶ But the personal and institutional networks that had propelled the Goldwater campaign into existence were strengthened, not weakened, by the campaign and by the 27 million votes their candidate had won. Almost as soon as the campaign ended, Goldwater's backers began to organize again. Using the connections made during the campaign, they founded two organizations, the short-lived Free Society Association and the much more successful American Conservative Union. “A battle was lost, not the war,” Denison Kitchel wrote to Goldwater supporters in December 1964.Footnote ⁹⁷

By the early 1960s, the conservative mobilization around economic issues had advanced considerably since the end of the Second World War. Business conservatives had successfully created a variety of different kinds of think tanks that were devoted to free-market politics. They had started to establish a new paradigm for labor relations, intended to demonstrate management prerogatives and to prevent unions from organizing new groups of workers. The political mobilization of conservatives in the business community during the 1950s formed an institutional basis for the support of an antiunion, low-tax economic agenda within the Republican Party, resulting in the Goldwater campaign. During the age of prosperity of the late 1960s, the business conservatives would not make significant new advances, but nor would they lose the ground that they had gained.Footnote ⁹⁸ When the economy entered a period of crisis in the late 1970s, one that was much more severe than that of the late 1950s, the business conservatives would be poised and ready. In the context of economic decline and social upheaval, voters would be much more receptive to their message. Far from emerging suddenly in the vortex of political conflict that spun out of the OPEC crisis and the Vietnam War, conservatives in the business community had been patiently building their economic agenda ever since the end of Second World War, during the very years that liberals believed were ones of consensus and social peace.

During the corporate mobilization of the 1970s, businessmen reacted against economic decline and a political climate that they perceived as hostile by forming organizations such as the Business Roundtable and by accelerating funding for institutions like the American Enterprise Institute. The business conservatives of the 1950s helped to establish important parts of the institutional groundwork for this later politicization of business. The business conservatives of the 1970s were able to build on the efforts of the earlier opposition to the New Deal, and further expand the free-market critique of liberalism; a critique which had new resonance in the context of stagflation, rising unemployment, and new levels of international competition, but which was nonetheless remarkably similar to that which had been developed earlier in the century.Footnote ⁹⁹ The opposition to liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s was also able to significantly weaken the labor movement in ways that would ultimately contribute to the disintegration of the liberal coalition.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Many scholars have argued that the economic arguments of the business right were not able to persuade voters until they were joined to the popular backlash of the cultural conservatives, who combined opposition to the civil rights movement with impassioned arguments on behalf of traditional gender roles.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Ronald Reagan's electoral triumph was in part the result of his ability to marry these two sides of the movement, which are frequently seen as being in tension with each other. But during the 1970s the leaders of the conservative movement in the South and among evangelical Christians—two of the most important groups in the conservative triumph—largely adopted the arguments of free-market thinkers and frequently spoke about the market and capitalism in their efforts to organize cultural conservatives. They were able to do so because of certain deep assumptions shared by the business conservatives and the cultural right, about the organic order of society and the importance of minimizing state power. While the economic arguments of the business conservatives may not have been able to win popular support alone, the view of the world that they expressed had deep continuities with that of the cultural right, and the synthesis of these two perspectives may account for the enduring power of conservatism in contemporary American politics. The business mobilization around free-market economics in the 1950s—and later, the 1970s—would provide one central pole of the organizing triumphs of the postwar conservative movement.