"In America," wrote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci around 1929, "rationalization has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process." By the 1920s, industrialization was hardly new to the United States; nor were the economic dislocation and cultural trauma of plough tenders becoming machine tenders and once-independent burghers becoming dependent employees* But the imperatives of industrialization—specialization, bureaucratization , national and world markets—had, in the decade following World War I, resulted in a corporate capitalist order as awesome in its social ramifications as in its unprecedented power. And that power, despite the debacle of the 1930s , would continue to expand and become more pervasive yet, through the heady years of Cold War prosperity and into our own less sanguine time.