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Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60. By Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf * Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995. xii + 307 pp. Photos, drawings, figures, and index. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-252-02118-5; paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-252-06439-9.
Here is a book of enormous import. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf offers a wealth of evidence to demonstrate the extent to which the American business community sought to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the power and legitimacy of organized labor. Regardless of the degree to which their firms were unionized, business leaders waged a strategic, ideological campaign at the workplace and within the community to recapture the hegemonic authority they thought the New Deal and the new unionism had so catastrophically disrupted.
Within their factories the human relations ideology of Elton Mayo and Abraham Maslow now reached operational fruition; management, in the words of one consultant, aimed to "get workers to accept what management wants them to accept but to make them feel they made or helped to make the decision" (p. 76). This was an era in which corporate sports teams, education programs and employee-oriented publications enjoyed a huge renaissance. Concluded an Armstrong Cork personnel director: "Class consciousness fades out of the picture when people are engaged in the pursuit of common interests" (p. 92).
Even more important, business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce were determined to rewin the confidence of community groups, civic associations and church members. During the war, New Deal liberalism had eroded the influence of...