In the space of about thirty years – from 1964 to 1994 – American corporations abandoned racially exclusionary employment policies and embraced some form of affirmative action to diversify their workforces. It was an extraordinary transformation, which most historians attribute to civil rights activists, federal legislation, and labor unions. This is the first book to examine the role of corporations in that transformation. Whereas others emphasize corporate obstruction, this book argues that there were corporate executives and managers who promoted fair employment and equal employment opportunity long before the federal government required it, and who thereby helped prepare the corporate world for racial integration. The book examines the pioneering corporations that experimented with integration in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as corporate responses to the civil rights movement and urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s and the widespread adoption of affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s.
This is the first book to examine how corporations contributed to integrating racial minorities into the American workplace in the latter half of the twentieth century.
An accurate picture of the LGBTQ rights movement’s achievements is incomplete without this surprising history of how corporate America joined the cause. Legal scholar Carlos Ball tells the overlooked story of how LGBTQ activism aimed at corporations since the Stonewall riots helped turn them from enterprises either indifferent to or openly hostile toward sexual minorities and transgender individuals into reliable and powerful allies of the movement for queer equality. As a result of street protests and boycotts during the 1970s, AIDS activism directed at pharmaceutical companies in the 1980s, and the push for corporate nondiscrimination policies and domestic partnership benefits in the 1990s, LGBTQ activism changed big business’s understanding and treatment of the queer community. By the 2000s, corporations were frequently and vigorously promoting LGBTQ equality, both within their walls and in the public sphere. Large companies such as American Airlines, Apple, Google, Marriott, and Walmart have been crucial allies in promoting marriage equality and opposing anti-LGBTQ regulations such as transgender bathroom laws. At a time when the LGBTQ movement is facing considerable political backlash, The Queering of Corporate America complicates the narrative of corporate conservatism and provides insights into the future legal, political, and cultural implications of this unexpected relationship.
Lockheed has been one of American’s largest corporations and most important defense contractors from World War II to the present day (since 1995 as part of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company). During the postwar era, its executives enacted complicated business responses to black demands for equality. Based on the papers of a personnel executive, the memoir of an African American employee, interviews, and company publications, this narrative history offers a unique inside perspective on the evolution of equal employment and affirmative action policies at Lockheed Aircraft’s massive Georgia plant from the early 1950s through the early 1980s. Randall L. Patton provides a rare, perhaps unique, account of African American struggle and management response, set within the context of the regional and national struggles for civil rights. The book describes the complex interplay of black protest, federal policy, and management action in a crucial space in the national economy and within the South, contributing to business history, policy history, labor history, and civil rights history.
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.
Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, Capital Gains highlights the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscores the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century—and today.
The Routledge Handbook of Modern Economic History aims to introduce readers to important approaches and findings of economic historians who study the modern world. Its short chapters reflect the most up-to-date research and are written by well-known economic historians who are authorities on their subjects. Modern economic history blends two approaches – Cliometrics (which focuses on measuring economic variables and explicitly testing theories about the historical performance and development of the economy) and the New Institutional Economics (which focuses on how social, cultural, legal and organizational norms and rules shape economic outcomes and their evolution). Part 1 of the Handbook introduces these approaches and other important methodological issues for economic history. The most fundamental shift in the economic history of the world began about two and a half centuries ago when eons of slow economic change and faltering economic growth gave way to sustained, rapid economic expansion. Part 2 examines this theme and the primary forces economic historians have linked to economic growth, stagnation and fluctuations – including technological change, entrepreneurship, competition, the biological environment, war, financial panics and business cycles. Part 3 examines the evolution of broad sectors that typify a modern economy including agriculture, banking, transportation, health care, housing, and entertainment. It begins by examining an equally important "sector" of the economy which scholars have increasingly analyzed using economic tools – religion. Part 4 focuses on the work force and human outcomes including inequality, labor markets, unions, education, immigration, slavery, urbanization, and the evolving economic roles of women and African-Americans. The text will be of great value to those taking economic history courses as well as a reference book useful to professional practitioners, policy makers and the public.
Harry Hudson, the first African American supervisor at Lockheed Aircraft's Georgia facility, recalls his thirty-six-year career that spanned the postwar civil rights movement and the Cold War. While not a civil rights activist, he knew he was helping to break down racial barriers that had long confined African Americans to lower-skilled jobs.
The untold story of how efforts to hold big business accountable changed American capitalism. Recent controversies around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and “woke capital” evoke an old idea: the Progressive Era vision of a socially responsible corporation. By midcentury, the notion that big business should benefit society was a consensus view. But as Kyle Edward Williams’s brilliant history, Taming the Octopus, shows, the tools forged by New Deal liberals to hold business leaders accountable, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, narrowly focused on the financial interests of shareholders. This inadvertently laid the groundwork for a set of fringe views to become dominant: that market forces should rule every facet of society. Along the way, American capitalism itself was reshaped, stripping businesses to their profit-making core. In this vivid and surprising history, we meet activists, investors, executives, and workers who fought over a simple question: Is the role of the corporation to deliver profits to shareholders, or something more? On one side were “business statesmen” who believed corporate largess could solve social problems. On the other were libertarian intellectuals such as Milton Friedman and his oft-forgotten contemporary, Henry Manne, whose theories justified the ruthless tactics of a growing class of corporate raiders. But Williams reveals that before the “activist investor” emerged as a capitalist archetype, Civil Rights groups used a similar playbook for different ends, buying shares to change a company from within. As a rising tide of activists pushed corporations to account for societal harms from napalm to environmental pollution to inequitable hiring, a new idea emerged: that managers could maximize value for society while still turning a maximal profit. This elusive ideal, “stakeholder capitalism,” still dominates our headlines today. Williams’s necessary history equips us to reconsider democracy’s tangled relationship with capitalism.
Skeptics might rationalize that Mitt Romney received a scant 6 percent of the black vote in 2012 only because African Americans would naturally favor one of their own. But since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has attracted more than 15 percent of the black electorate, and few GOP candidates for other offices have fared much better. No segment of the American electorate is more reliably Democratic than African Americans. The GOP, meanwhile, remains nearly an all-white party. In this path-breaking book, historian Timothy Thurber illuminates the deep roots of this gulf by exploring the contentious, and sometimes surprising, relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party from the end of World War II through Richard Nixon’s presidency. The GOP, he shows, shaped the modern civil rights movement, but the struggle for racial equality also transformed the GOP. Thurber challenges conventional wisdom that the “party of Lincoln” disappeared in the mid-1960s. Prior to 1964, the GOP was indifferent or hostile to many of the demands from civil rights activists. During the height of the civil rights revolution, Republicans were essential to enacting federal policies that made American society more egalitarian. The GOP helped defend, and sometimes expanded, those reforms in the early 1970s. Conservatives were not as dominant after 1964 as scholars and pundits often portray. Yet throughout these three decades the rift between African Americans and the GOP remained substantial. They disagreed, often sharply, over the role of the federal government, particularly regarding economic matters and the integration of schools and neighborhoods. They had different views about race and American society. They also clashed in the political arena, where Republicans wrote off the black vote as unwinnable, irrelevant, or counterproductive to their drive to supplant the Democrats as the nation’s majority party. The GOP preferred to court whites nationwide, sometimes by appealing to their racial animosities. That strategy often yielded electoral success, but the legacy of the past looms large in the early twenty-first century. With its depth of research and insight, Republicans and Race will stand as a definitive study as the GOP ponders the composition of its base in future elections.
