786 ★ CHAPTER 20 From Business Culture to Great Depression
The Image of Business
Hollywood films spread images of “the American way of life” across the globe.
America, wrote the historian Charles Beard, was “boring its way” into the
world’s consciousness. In high wages, efficient factories, and the mass produc-
tion of consumer goods, Americans seemed to have discovered the secret of per-
manent prosperity. Businessmen like Henry Ford and engineers like Herbert
Hoover were cultural heroes. Photographers such as Lewis Hine and Marga-
ret Bourke- White and painters like Charles Sheeler celebrated the beauty of
machines and factories. The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 best- seller by advertis-
ing executive Bruce Barton, portrayed Jesus Christ as “the greatest advertiser
of his day,... a virile go- getting he- man of business,” who “picked twelve men
from the bottom ranks and forged a great organization.”
After the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, discussed in Chapter 18, John D. Rocke-
feller himself hired a public relations firm to repair his tarnished image. Now,
persuaded by the success of World War I’s Committee on Public Information,
numerous firms established public relations departments to justify corporate
practices to the public and counteract its long- standing distrust of big business.
They succeeded in changing popular attitudes toward Wall Street. Congres-
sional hearings of 1912–1914 headed by Louisiana congressman Arsène Pujo
had laid bare the manipulation of stock prices by a Wall Street “money trust.”
The Pujo investigation had reinforced the widespread view of the stock market
as a place where insiders fleeced small investors— as, indeed, they frequently
did. But in the 1920s, as the steadily rising price of stocks made front- page news,
the market attracted more investors. Many assumed that stock values would rise
forever. By 1928, an estimated 1.5 million Americans owned stock— still a small
minority of the country’s 28 million families, but far more than in the past.
The Decline of Labor
With the defeat of the labor upsurge of 1919 and the dismantling of the war-
time regulatory state, business appropriated the rhetoric of Americanism and
“industrial freedom” as weapons against labor unions. Some corporations
during the 1920s implemented a new style of management. They provided their
employees with private pensions and medical insurance plans, job security,
and greater workplace safety. They established sports programs to occupy their
employees’ leisure time. They spoke of “welfare capitalism,” a more socially
conscious kind of business leadership, and trumpeted the fact that they now
paid more attention to the “human factor” in employment.
At the same time, however, employers in the 1920s embraced the American
Plan, at whose core stood the open shop— a workplace free of both government