What's Good for Business

Business and American Politics since World War II

Edited by Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer

First book to showcase the generation of scholars who are shaping the reemergent field of political economy and history of capitalism.
Looks at numerous examples of the interplay of business and politics.

What's Good for Business

Business and American Politics since World War II

Edited by Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer

Description

This volume showcases the most exciting new voices in the fields of business and political history. While the media frequently warns of the newfound power of business in the world of politics, the authors in this book demonstrate that business has mobilized to shape public policy and government institutions, as well as electoral outcomes, for decades. Rather than assuming that business influence is inevitable, the chapters explore the complex evolution of this relationship in a wide range of different arenas--from attempts to create a corporate-friendly tax policy and regulations that would work in the interests of particular industries, to local boosterism as a weapon against New Deal liberalism, to the nexus between evangelical Christianity and the oil industry, to the frustrations that business people felt in struggles with public interest groups. The history that emerges show business actors organizing themselves to affect government in myriad ways, sometimes successfully but other times with outcomes far different than they hoped for.

The result in an image of American politics that is more complex and contested than it is often thought to be. The essays represent a new trend in scholarship on political economy, one that seeks to break down the barriers that once separated old subfields to offer a vision of the economy as shaped by politics and political life influenced by economic relationships.

What's Good for Business

Business and American Politics since World War II

Edited by Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction What's Good for Business?, Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer
1. The Advantages of Obscurity: World War II Tax Carry-Back Provisions and the Normalization of Corporate Welfare, Mark R. Wilson
2. Virtue, Necessity, and Irony in the Politics of Civil Rights: Organized Business and Fair Employment Practices in Postwar Cleveland, Anthony S. Chen
3. Moving Mountains: The Business of Evangelicalism and Extraction in a Liberal Age, Darren Dochuk
4. "Take Government Out of Business By Putting Business Into Government": Local Boosters, National CEOs, Experts, and the Politics of Mid-Century Capital Mobility, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
5. The Liberal Invention of the Multinational Corporation: David Lilienthal and Postwar Capitalism, Jason Scott Smith
6. Pharmaceutical Politics and Regulatory Reform in Postwar America, Dominique A. Tobbell
7. Games of Chance: Jim Crow's Entrepreneurs Bet on 'Negro' Law-and-Order, N.D.B. Connolly
8. The End of Public Power: Place and the Postwar Electric Utility Industry, Andrew Needham
9. Supermarkets, Free Markets, and the Problem of Buyer Power in the Postwar United States, Shane Hamilton
10. Rethinking the Postwar Corporation: Management, Monopolies, and Markets, Louis Hyman
11. The Politics of Environmental Regulation: Business-Government Relations in the 1970s and Beyond, Meg Jacobs
12. The Corporate Mobilization against Liberal Reform: Big Business Day, 1980, Benjamin Waterhouse
Epilogue, Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer

What's Good for Business

Business and American Politics since World War II

Edited by Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer

Author Information

Kim Phillips-Fein is an Assistant Professor at the Gallatin School of NYU and is the author of Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan.

Julian E. Zelizer is Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton. He is numerous books, including Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security - From World War II to the War on Terrorism and Governing America: The Revival of Political History.

Contributors:

Anthony S. Chen, Associate Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University

N. D. B. Connolly, Assistant Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University

Darren Dochuk, Associate Professor of History, Purdue University

Shane Hamilton, Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia

Louis Hyman, Assistant Professor of Labor Relations, Law, and History, Industrial Labor Relations School, Cornell University

Meg Jacobs, Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Andrew Needham, Assistant Professor of History, New York University

Kim Phillips-Fein, Assistant Professor, Gallatin School of New York University.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Assistant Professor of History, Loyola University of Chicago

Jason Scott Smith, Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico

Dominique A. Tobbell, Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, University of Minnesota

Benjamin Waterhouse, Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mark R. Wilson, Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Julian E. Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs, Princeton University

What's Good for Business

Business and American Politics since World War II

Edited by Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian E. Zelizer

Reviews and Awards

"These 12 thoughtful, engaging essays examine the numerous and complex way that business leaders sought to influence politics in the post-WWII period and prompt deeper research onthe political economy. Highly Recommended."--CHOICE

"This excellent volume collects the work of a dozen scholars, indicating that we are in the midst of a renaissance of business history, with a new focus on integrating detailed study of business practice with other major aspects of American history."--James Hoopes, Journal of American History