Adversarial Relations? Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America (original) (raw)

and the "corporate liberal'' school of the mid-twentieth century. Tuey show how businesspeople might at various points for a range of reasons seek to promote a larger government, while at the same time pressing for the interests of business as a class. These authors are more nuanced in their approach to the politics of business than were the Progressives, but are also more skeptical about the ideological commitments of businesspeople than were the New Left historians of corporate capitalism. Tuey emphasize the role of business in shaping a state devoted to furthering the economic interests and activities of the private sector. Above all, the scholars whose work is collected here suggest the importance of taking businesspeople seriously as political actors, analyzing the variety of w~ys that they have sought to shape public life rather than assuming that they automatically wield political power and always do so in the >. . same way. Tuey suggest the difficulties of making generalizations about .what businesspeople think, and the coexistence of highly diverse approaches to politics in the business world. Tuey portray businesspeople as possessing a range of political ideas and trying to use their identities as business leaders to advance different political ends. Tue authors look at struggles inside the busicommunity, and even within organizations, such as the National Asso-'. ciation of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which historians 'have often: assumed to speak with a single voice. Tuey suggest the necessity of paying close attention to government at different levels-oflooking at local, urban, and state governments alongside the national polity. Finally, they • point to the value of looking closely and carefully at what businesspeople actually did, not only at what they said and their explicitly ideological pronouncements. But perhaps most of all, these essays call attention to the unwieldy but often successful efforts of businesspeople to act as a class, and to their various concerted attempts to define and advance their own agendas through political engagement. Even as historians deploy the social history tools developed by specialists in labor, civil rights, and other social movements to study business elites, it is important to remember that the access these elites enjoyed to economic resources and to the halls of political. power set them apart from the social movements that often criticized them. Looking at the ways in which businesspeople have mobilized politically, and their attempts to build a state that they could trust and control, helps us • to move beyond the partisan rhetoric of electoral politics, and teaches us much about the history of the twentieth century that otherwise. remains hard to fully understand.