Building Home by Abrahamson Eric John

Author:Abrahamson, Eric John
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520273757
Publisher: University of California Press

CULTURE IN THE MANAGED ECONOMY

As Ahmanson transitioned from entrepreneur to cultural patron, others in the savings and loan industry in Southern California followed the same path, including Mark Taper and Bart Lytton. The localism at the heart of the industry's development, embedded in government policies that restricted operations to narrow geographic areas, reinforced the close relationship between local entrepreneurs and the community as a whole. This relationship in Los Angeles also reflected larger patterns in American society.

In 1962, historian Robert Wiebe traced the evolving relationship between business and government in the United States. He described the many ways in which government had become the arena for resolving once-bitter street fights among competitors and between shippers and producers, and labor and management in the American economy. Along the way, he said, the federal government had grown throughout the early twentieth century to rival business for national leadership. But in reality there was no rivalry, Wiebe concluded: “The great blend of our time has so intermixed business and government that a practical, precise separation of the two is no longer possible.”107

Wiebe's observations were focused primarily on the regulatory environment, but they also carried over into cultural and social policy. By the early 1950s, presidents and governors regularly consulted business leaders on social issues. Increasingly, great entrepreneurial wealth in America was given to private philanthropy. Innovators like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had restructured the practice of the philanthropy to fund social innovation with an eye to transforming charity and government. These developments complemented the partnership between business and government in the regulatory environment and extended them into the social realm.

To a government entrepreneur like Howard Ahmanson this partnership between government and business in the cultural arena was totally appropriate. Ahmanson's gift to LACMA, for example, was one of many and in the end not the largest. Los Angeles County taxpayers, through the agency of their Board of Supervisors, made the biggest commitment by promising to fund the new museum's operations into the distant future. The project was conceived as a joint venture between the public and private sectors to promote civic culture. Given Ahmanson's apparent role in brokering this deal with the Board of Supervisors, it seems clear that he believed in the appropriateness, or at least the expediency, of this kind of partnership. Many business leaders did. It was simply another reflection of the cooperative relationship between business and government in the postwar economy.

Wiebe was impressed with this brilliant accommodation and suggested that it was responsible for the nation's prosperity and domestic tranquility. “With so few signs of domestic upheaval at the beginning of the 1960's,” he wrote, “any elite would take pride in the record of America's durable business leadership.”108 Unfortunately for Wiebe, Howard Ahmanson, and the nation, the inherent and relentless destructive and creative forces of capitalism, combined with long-repressed resentment and dissatisfaction in the nation, opened a new era whose history would fade the brilliance of this great accommodation.

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