Corporate Conservatives Go to War by Charlie Whitham

Author:Charlie Whitham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030439088
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The speaker’s booklet, Speak-Up Management—Tell the “Folks”, supplied an in-depth collection of ‘basic facts about our American Private Enterprise System’ to help managers satisfy an array of potential questions from their employees. Declaring that ‘our free enterprise system and the managers of enterprise are face-to-face with the most serious challenge in their history’, the booklet implored managers to ‘tell and retell the public’ that ‘lasting prosperity lies in our private enterprise system’. To this end, the manager’s task was to provide ‘living, convincing proof’ of the soundness of free enterprise by bringing to the individual firm ‘demonstrations of good motives and good objectives, of real interest in the workers, and genuine concern for the public warfare’. The booklet contained finely crafted answers to the main questions that managers were likely to face, including two of the most discomforting for champions of free enterprise. The first related to the US war production ‘miracle’, an obvious reference point in showcasing the worth of free enterprise and one that ‘should certainly have removed all doubts’ about the reliability of private enterprise to deliver. Still, the booklet tackled the awkward fact that production reached such unparalleled heights thanks to massive government spending by responding that ‘money and orders and wishful thinking do not turn out the weapons of victory. It takes men and machines and managerial “know how” to produce’, and ‘Our American enterprise system…did the job despite a dozen years of depression. It proved its vitality – its competence’. The most strained explanation, and the one which demanded the greatest leap of faith, was reserved for perhaps the most uncomfortable question faced by free enterprisers. To those who might suggest that it was unregulated free enterprise that caused the Great Depression to occur in the first place, it was advanced that new techniques invented since for preventing monetary and credit inflation, applied with ‘intelligence’, could ‘eliminate this depression cause’. All that was needed was a ‘better understanding of the way our economy functions’. Accordingly, ‘depression does not arise out of the way in which the economy is organized; but out of the way in which men act. While some fluctuation of business activity is probably unavoidable, we need never again sink into depression…By the pursuit of clearly indicated policies and by the exercise of self-restraint we can avoid depression without sacrificing our free way of life’.95

After years of defensiveness, Weisenburger calculated that the stock of private enterprise was such that it no longer had to dodge the hard questions. The NAM entered the final stretch of the war period in strident mood. The momentum established in 1943 had gathered pace during 1944 in a series of bold initiatives of unprecedented scale for the NAM. At the level of national policy, the NAM approached individual groups, Congress and government to further the interests of private enterprise, which appeared to bear fruit in the mechanisms for reconversion. By the end of the year, most of the important practical questions related to the transition from war

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