The Public Image of Big Business in America, 1880-1940: A Quantitative Study in Social Change [Book Review]

Abstract

How and why have American middle-class attitudes toward big business varied since the rise of the large corporation? Louis Galambos seeks to go beyond previous impressionistic answers to this question by making a systematic, quantitative analysis of the content of issues selected from sixty years of eleven special interest magazines. These magazines catered to four occupational groups-farmers, trade unionists, Congregational clergymen, and engineers-which he takes to be representative of the "middle cultures." Largely neutral toward the "trusts" in the 1880s, farmers, laborers, and clergymen, according to Galambos, blamed giant industry for their economic difficulties and status decline in the 1890s and politely applauded TR's symbolic trustbusting. The engineers were largely economically comfortable, apolitical technocrats throughout the sixty-year period. Increasingly influenced by the conservative views of such organizations as the Farm Bureau and AFL, the middle-class gradually but steadily substituted the bureaucratic for the individualistic ideal. After World War I, businesses appeared in these magazines not as "octupuses" or "monsters," but as "firms" or "corporations." Mass unemployment, FDR's attacks on "economic royalists," leftist organizing, and the TNEC investigations failed to rekindle any anti-capitalist blaze in a middle-class mind fireproofed by what he terms "the organizational revolution."

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