On 11/19/2010 3:58 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> What's good to read about this period?
If you haven't already, you should read Martin Sklar's The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, a really important book. Sklar, among many other things, dismisses the idea of a business split along size lines. It's worth reading about the labor side too, to know what exactly these people were fighting. David Montgomery's Fall of the House of Labor is probably un-surpassable on this period. There are a couple of more recent books I haven't read on this: The National Civic Federation and the Making of a New Liberalism is a history of the NCF - though I've read that the book, while competent, is weak. Jeffrey Haydu's Citizen Employers compares the business communities of San Francisco and (I think) Cleveland in the Progressive era and shows how different degrees of capitalist unity or disunity had big effects. It's supposed to be a first-rate book.
By the way, the old saw about big vs. small business is a bequest of New Left scholarship, specifically the "corporate liberalism" thesis. The ur-text on that is Jimmy Weinstein's The Corporate Ideal of the Liberal State. It's amazing to me how much of today's left-wing conventional wisdom, on innumerable topics (all of which I dutifully absorbed from my reading as a teenager in the 90s), can be traced to a handful of specific books written by New Left authors in the 60s and 70s. I'm not necessarily saying that stuff had a higher quotient of wrong-ness than your average sample of scholarship, but a lot of it is wrong. Yet it continues to be conventional wisdom. In the case of the "corporate liberalism" thesis, I think the political context at the time was that there was a need (a) to explain why the ruling class seemed so liberal; and (b) why it was nevertheless a cover for capitalist oppression. Hence the thesis about big business = liberal, small business = conservative. The notion that the ruling class might be liberal because it had been forced into a compromise with insurgencies from below was, I guess, not a usable past.
SA