Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users, please click the view more button below to purchase a copy of this dissertation from Proquest.
(Some titles may also be available free of charge in our Open Access Dissertation Collection, so please check there first.)
Beneath consensus: Business, labor, and the postwar order
Abstract
In 1945, the business community worried about its ability to shape the post-war political and economic reconstruction. Industrialists had lost enormous prestige in the depression, and during the New Deal faced sharp challenges from liberalism and organized labor. World War II provided business leaders with an opportunity to restore their reputation if not their dominance, but in the post-war decade there were a number of major national issues still open to debate. American society had yet to reach a consensus on the relationship of government to the economy, on the proper size of the welfare state, and on the scope of union power in the factory. The business community began mobilizing to regain the political and economic initiative in this debate. This study explores the business community's ideological attack against its primary opponent, organized labor, and against tile liberal, New Deal philosophy unions represented. It also examines the ways workers and their unions both resisted and reshaped employer actions. In the years after World War II, the business leaders engaged in an attempt to restructure the ideas and images that constituted America's political culture. They conducted a widespread and intensive campaign to sell Americans on the virtues of individualism as opposed to collectivism or unions, freedom as opposed to state control and centrality of the free enterprise system to the American way of life. The most obvious efforts to shape ideology and to create the more conservative, consensual political climate that historians associate with the fifties took place at the national level. National business organizations like the Advertising Council orchestrated massive public relations campaigns that relied on the mass media to sell business and capitalism. Employers also recognized the need for more direct connection with the public. Sensing that organized labor challenged their ability to shape worker attitudes and provide political leadership, moderate as well as conservative employers sought to undermine union power through a program that drew upon human relations and welfarism in order to build worker allegiance to the firm. Fearing for lost authority beyond their factory gates, employers also instituted sophisticated community relations programs promoting the free enterprise system.
Subject Area
American history|Labor relations|Political science
Recommended Citation
Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth Ann, "Beneath consensus: Business, labor, and the postwar order" (1990). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9110139.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9110139