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The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Going variously under the label of political history, business history, or the history of capitalism (among others), scholars have recently turned renewed attention to the business elite. Capital Gains brings together essays from historians at the forefront of that trend. Applying the techniques of social history, with its emphasis on agency and multivocality, these authors move beyond the power-versus-democracy dualism that plagued previous generations of scholars, including Beard and the progressive school, to offer a more nuanced picture of business leaders as historical actors.1The essays collected for Capital Gains are eminently readable. Each stands on its own as a fascinating snapshot into topics as varied as anti-trust and patent law, the public-university system, anti-Vietnam protests, and the history of workplace diversity initiatives. More importantly, these essays together help to contextualize the rise of corporate power in the twentieth-century United States. Laura Phillips Sawyer’s chapter about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for example, demonstrates implicitly that a business class had to be made through bodies like trade associations. Other chapters—including Daniel Amsterdam’s about businessmen’s efforts to create a “civic welfare state” in Atlanta and Detroit, and Tami Friedman’s about economic redevelopment in the northeast—show that corporate power has operated differently at the local and national levels, often with separate, even conflicting, sets of financial and political imperatives. The book dwells also on what has become the dominant narrative in studies of business conservatism—that the business class has been generally anti-statist, yet eager to support the expansion of state power when and how it suited their interests. The book offers numerous examples of what Elizabeth Tandy Shermer calls “fraught partnership[s],” the various alliances forged between business groups and government agencies in pursuit of what the National Association of Manufacturers terms “a favorable business climate” (157, 124).The book’s strength is its ability to acknowledge the cohesion of a business class while also probing its sites of fracture. Jennifer Delton’s chapter examines a rift in the National Association of Manufacturers (nam) between the more conservative “old nam” members and a new generation of corporate liberals over the meaning of “social responsibility” (193). Delton and others also find in sites of discord an under-appreciated relationship between business and liberalism. New Deal jobs and infrastructure programs, in Brent Cebul’s telling, were to Georgia businessmen “unprecedented wellsprings of economic stimulus,” a form of “supply-side liberalism” (140). The pursuit of profit has, as Eric Smith’s chapter about the anti-war movement shows, often dovetailed with presumably liberal causes.Richard John’s introduction (an excellent historiographical essay) situates Capital Gains in an interdisciplinary “trading zone” in which scholars “build not only on the moral vision of the political historian and the comparative institutionalism of the business historian but also on the path-dependent models of the apd [American political development] political scientist and the state-centered social theory of the historical sociologist” (13, 14). Looking back at McCraw’s work, moreover, John and Jason Scott Smith remind us that many of the foundational figures in business history and political economy were self-consciously interdisciplinary.2 McCraw drew from institutional economics, economic thought, public policy, history, and the social sciences.For all its strengths, however, the book may fall short as a model of interdisciplinarity. The contributors utilize a broad range of archival sources. Mark Wilson, for instance, incorporates evidence from military history, science and technology studies, policy, and political science to tell a new story about privatization and the military-industrial complex. Methodologically, however, the book might have benefited from chapters further afield from history. Contributions from policy analysts, economists, or social scientists—in addition to historians interested in the work of economists and social scientists—would only have enhanced what is already a rich account of business, politics, and power in the United States. Nevertheless, Capital Gains is admirably cohesive in tone and argument, and will interest readers across a range of disciplines. It demonstrates the promise of writing history, as Hyman puts it, from the “bottom up, all the way to the top.”3

Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America