“But without a commitment to economic growth, what is the raison d’etre of capitalism?” Daniel Bell, 1976
For all their antagonism to the United Nations, human rights activists, and other “one-worlders,” American capitalists in the postwar era invested considerable energy constructing a global vision. Defenders of the nation also created integrated networks well beyond the boundaries of the United States. The 1960s evinced astounding economic growth, and business enterprisers celebrated the vast expansion of market culture and multinational corporations. The 1970s, however, underscored the limits to capitalist imperatives of total growth. Capitalists increasingly were forced to defend themselves; their visions of an interdependent world conflicted with ecological and political constraints. Contradictions existed between state and corporate sovereignties, and tensions erupted that complicated the very idea of the American nation.
President Jimmy Carter resided at the center of this conflict, and might be considered a symbol of the problems of growth during the age of limits. Certainly, the political economic contest between his position and “big business” reflected central issues in American society. The capitalist class attempted to reconcile their One World vision with their traditional values. How did their beliefs translate into the material sphere, in the market and the built environment? They dramatically increased their espousals of total expansion during a time when many expressed anxieties about ecological destruction, pollution, and overpopulation. With protracted, intense public focus on their activities in the 1970s, how did many capitalists respond? Studying the corporate elites, their cultural values and social beliefs, helps illuminate one of the most dramatic transformations in American society.
Increasingly, scholars have asked questions about the political economy of global capitalism. New studies published in the last few years have begun framing the 1970s from many fascinating and informative perspectives. However, few historians have investigated the capitalists themselves, nor have they begun writing social histories of the capitalist class and the managers of multinational corporations. Paying close attention to capitalist enthusiasms during the shift from the national to the transnational sphere is vital for understanding the postwar period. Further, corporate executives helped shed light on the transformation from 1960s total growth to 1970s anxious attempts at conservation. Even raising the question of limits, however, posed serious political and social risks, as President Carter learned. Perhaps his presidency marked a contingent moment when exploring tensions between growth and limits could have been resolved in alternative ways. For one, those who queried ecological constraints and the contradictions of capitalism, like the capitalists explored in this paper, increasingly turned to global networks.
American capitalists of the postwar era especially saw the entire world and its resources as a system and a machine that could help the rich increase their wealth while at the same time tending the basic needs of the poor. The capitalists in this study envisioned a world order based on their prerogatives, and on state and market integration. In the 1960’s corporate executives experienced the elixir of positive economic growth. As economic historian Stanley Buder conceptualized it, “American business at the beginning of the 1960s had ‘stood tall at home and abroad.’” Yet even in the 1970s, the era of the “age of limits,” still they proffered a vision of growth as the only way to solve the economic crisis and save the world from disorder. In 1976, at the height of social, political and cultural anxieties about the emerging new order, sociologist Daniel Bell wrote that “while economic growth has never had the emotional power of nationalism, or of other ideological appeals that have been used to mobilize societies, it has become an important creed for Western industrial societies.” International corporation leaders at this time led the ideas and practices of this vision.
Further, their imperatives might be viewed as an expression of “business exceptionalism,” rather than a distinctly American or European exceptionalism. Society, economy and ecology were especially entwined during the long 1970s, and the tensions between growth and limits were extreme; they were touched upon, investigated, and fretted by every segment of society. Bell asked, “if there is not commitment to economic growth, what can the Soviet Union – or Japan, or the United States – hold out as a social goal for its people?” Just as President Carter queried, and staked his presidency upon, these issues, Bell noted that “paradoxically, economic growth may be the source of a distinctive contradiction of capitalism, a contradiction which may be the cause of its economic undoing.” Growth, creative destruction, and ecological limits expressed themselves in the visible world during the ruptures and crises of the 1970s. Carter possessed a vision of how to address these problems. And he was defeated by those who desired to maintain a belief in total growth, a positive future, and the greatness of the United States in the world.
One of Carter’s final acts as president was to commission the Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the 21st Century. The report summarized the concerns and fears of the previous decade. Additionally, the report encapsulated the tensions and contradictions of Carter’s only term in office, and America’s overall reaction to his vision of limitations and conservation. In this distinctive “age of limits,” Global 2000 engaged such issues as population, resources, energy, and the environmental impacts of agriculture, deforestation, the world’s atmosphere, nuclear energy and species extinctions. Ronald Reagan did not share this outlook, and by 1981, neither did most Americans.
Economic historian Raymond Vernon stated, in his multi-year study of global corporations at Harvard Business School in the early 1970s, that American multinationals began to develop a transnational identity. “If corporate officials can be taken at their word, as they probably can,” he argued, “there has been a growing disposition on the part of the management of U.S.-controlled enterprise to move toward a state of geographic neutrality.” During an increasingly complex world, and with a cultural proliferation of attempts to understand this world, capitalists themselves exhibited a pragmatic relationship to geography, state power, and international relations. Through their actions and their thoughts, businessmen during this era began to substantiate a kind of business exceptionalism that existed in a supranational realm, even if these positions conflicted with political ideology and national identity.
In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalists and their political allies increasingly delineated and asserted the terms of global peace. The struggles to maintain national interest, security and power with a focus on energy and food requirements were central to state sustainability claims. In all, national and multinational corporations’ (MNC) claims on resources created global tensions and an interconnected system of extraction, appropriation and distribution. The instrumentalities for such control over geographies were intense, and international relations did not neglect market competition specifically determined by survival requirements and the pressures of a growing global population.
Many capitalists represented a kind of business pragmatism and business exceptionalism that ultimately led them to live and think liberally. In the immediate postwar environment, American capitalists enthusiastically contributed to constructing a new world order based on their outlook and material energies. Studebaker president Paul Hoffman was appointed Economic Cooperation Administrator (ECA) to oversee the implementation of the Marshall Plan after 1948. Hoffman evinced an immediate willingness to merge state and corporate interests in making European – and global – reconstruction work on the ground. Manhattan real estate tycoon William Zeckendorf, who developed the United Nations building, may have called his company American Superpower in 1952, but he had no problem making money while constructing the building that would become inimical to the ideology of Republicans. Business pragmatism and a global reach reflected the outlook of the Ford Motor Company, as well. In the 1960s, even with potential problems in Central America, the company committed itself to doing business there. Ford had possessed no philosophical problem with engaging enterprise in Hitler’s Germany, and it sought opportunity and market control anywhere it could. Fears of inflation and political unrest in Less Developed Countries were mere business decisions. As economic historian Mira Wilkins wrote, “the perils of overseas expansion . . . had no effect on the company’s general policy of Latin American expansion. New American government guarantees against expropriation also made the path smoother.” The vision of a global One World and integration of markets seemed to build upon individual entrepreneurship and enterprise, with pride of growth and access, but American enterprise abroad also was insured and subsidized by the federal government. Businessmen possessed a global vision of expansion and health, an idea of raising standards of living, and an ideology of aiding developing countries. This worldview was a kind of civilizing mission, economic as well as missionary, and, as historian Fredrik Jonsson recently showed about Adam Smith, economics as theology.
Ford Motor Company realized it could operate under capitalist, mixed economy, or socialist governments in the 1960s. At a Ford-Werke board meeting in Cologne, Henry Ford II discussed with the directors a plan for a new small passenger car “which would possess individual characteristics sufficient to distinguish it from any other Ford product. As the same principle is being followed by Ford Motor Company, Dearborn; by Ford Motor Company Limited, Dagenham; and by Ford SAF, Paris, the Ford organization would at a later date be able to market a large range of cars without having several factories building the same kind of car.” Executives pondered not whether, but how, to continue business relationships with socialists and communists. Capitalists in this early postwar era worked with politicians and military leaders to construct a material world based on an American model of hyper growth and consumption, and many corporations stepped in to provide products – and infrastructures like pipelines and refineries and highway projects – to facilitate faster rates of communication, transportation, production and consumption. The era witnessed real-world strategies based on ideals that contributed to a transformed global space, new interconnections, and nascent models for credit and debt that sustained total growth within a vision of the global – the idea and the concrete reality of the earth itself. These growing pressures contributed to the multinational moment in the 1960s and 1970s, and to the environmental, anticapitalist, and overpopulation anxieties of the same period in what some have called an ecological age.
Many manufacturers, construction and engineering companies enjoyed spectacular growth during the late 1950s and 1960s, such as Ford for motor vehicles and Bechtel for infrastructure projects that supported the new production and consumption regime. This corporate expansion included, of course, the military industrial complex. But this complex was not simply the standard story of California’s development in books such as historian Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors. American capitalists followed the military around the world in the postwar period – companies such as Honeywell, IBM, General Electric, Raytheon, Bechtel, and even food companies such as Cargill. Where there were military installations, there also was Department of Defense employees, civil servants, expatriates, and, importantly, capitalists and their families. Part of the new postwar hegemony, hardly discussed in the historiography, was the expansion of American individuals and families with their actual presence in the world, along with their ideas, values and possessions. Riding the leading wave of postwar global capitalist expansion, and building the material infrastructure of such a world, was the Bechtel Corporation.
Bechtel carried a vision of global expansion that was tied to industrial, urban, and population growth. Expansion at the University of California, for example, was based solely on the huge influx of migrants into the state after the war, and along with a general boom in the U.S. population. Movement, transport, communication, and the energy that fires this human activity inspired Bechtel to be the company that profited from growing domestic population, and increasing world integration. The Bechtel Corporation placed itself in a position to profit from expanding population, and state, federal and international governmental projects that addressed continual growth while solving problems related to development. They were not concerned about sustainability, either in population or consumption, but in using technologies to adapt to new crises that arose because of humanity’s expansion requirements. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bechtel showed that it had an ear on society’s cries about the environment, overpopulation and resource exploitation by addressing these issues and how they would solve them.
Bechtel experienced stupendous growth in the late 1960s, which reflected the boom before stagflation of the early 1970s. The 1960s was a period of rapid economic growth and opportunity, especially in the postwar global sphere. Consumption expanded rapidly as did the demand for petroleum, raw materials and energy sources that fueled this increase in desire and population. Bechtel profited off this boom moment, and it expanded its operating capacity with a palpable glee and pride. “Bechtel’s growth rate in the 1960s was substantially greater than ever before,” and covered multiple projects involving international consortiums of private and public interest. Bechtel’s growth reflected “the rapid acceleration of world economies,” and that “risk capital,” as we have seen by looking at the multinational moment, “was becoming more and more international.” The Bechtel projects involved other countries, and pipelines in Europe that cut transportation costs, shipping times from the Middle East to postwar central Europe, the largest oil field in the world that contained “bitumen-like’ petroleum “firmly imprisoned in sand” that had to be violently extracted from that sand and to create “a high-grade synthetic crude oil for transportation by pipeline to the Edmonton pipeline grid.” Knowledge of the grid system, connected to other pipeline and transportation networks, and a visualization of this grid, is necessary in order to properly see the expanding nature of humanity’s consuming needs. Additionally, the Bechtel’s 1960s witnessed a massive copper pit mine in South Africa, iron ore extraction and transportation in Australia, and others from Labrador to Libya. These projects also were combined with publicly owned initiatives in the San Francisco Bay Area with the creation of Bay Area Rapid Transit, and of the Wells Hydrocombine complex on the Columbia River to create project worth close to $3 billion. All of these international projects, in keeping with a corporate vision of world integration and growth, emphasized the pioneering nature of the works. Bechtel pubic relations materials lauded the “foresight, courage and confidence of the true entrepreneur, with tremendously important long-term implications for the entire petroleum industry.” And raw materials required for industrial requirements and the near-frenzied consumption needs of an increasingly prosperous and growing global population.
Bechtel existed as an expression of resource extraction, refining, manufacturing, delivery, and the consumption chain, contained within an image of Humanity’s continual motion and economic and cultural habits. Bechtel’s technologies manipulated raw materials on site, transported the minerals and oil as cheaply as possible to ports, built the ports, and then constructed the refineries and other necessary manufacturing centers for extracted materials. They contracted with multiple companies and several countries on many of their development projects. Senior officials flew to worksites far removed from corporate headquarters, to Australia, the Arctic Circle and the Middle East. They often paid for executive wives to attend journeys to exotic extraction locations. Throughout, Bechtel maintained a distinct enthusiasm for the newness of their projects, the cutting edge nature of their work, and the profound implications of engineering and construction for the good of humanity and the planet. Bechtel operated at key points along the industrial chain, maneuvered public/ private spheres, and profited off growing demand, growing needs and burgeoning population. Bechtel existed at the center of community building, city planning, urban and industrial development, and everything from warfare to private automobile choices.
Expansion, as a phrase, idea and reality, was a principal rubric of corporate, governmental and activist understanding in the 1960s. Expansion of oil production and movement, expansion of population and people movement, expansion of air travel and accommodation needs, expansion of steel production, automobile manufacturing, expansion of energy needs, hydroelectric, coal, nuclear, constant and mindless expansion that seemed to react to growth rather than plan it. Bechtel’s corporate vision helped make this growth possible. Fundamentally, the company saw itself as transnational, uniquely mobile, and able to pragmatically and economically tend to any contingency on the ground, whether political, geological, or technological. Bechtel believed that it helped the human world move. The company was, and is, a quintessential growth and energy company, building the core structures that supported human improvement and movement.
Ingram’s account continually expressed the marvels and the realities of growth, whether in corporate structure, worldwide reach, or material realities of the company’s extraction, transportation and refining businesses. Bechtel’s growth also indicated the importance of raw materials and petroleum businesses at this time, cresting the postwar consumption boom, the growth of world economies, reliance on the automobile and other transport vehicles, and the moment prior to the OPEC oil embargo. Hot wars and the Cold War factored into Bechtel’s ideology and its structural movements in the world. As Ingram wrote, “consistent with Bechtel’s progress, by 1967 its senior management population had increased to over 200 worldwide, double the 1960 number.” As noted elsewhere, multinational corporations were not new, nor were capitalist integrations of global spaces. But Bechtel reflected the rapid increase of world commerce, growth and trade, as well as the population boom. The excitement expressed by corporations such as Bechtel in the 1960s needed to be defended and explained by the 1970s, as public and policy anxieties rose to the surface.
Bechtel’s self-image, like those of other corporations and capitalists, established notions of continuity and tradition as mainstays of their organization and world vision. However, the very nature of their work in the world demanded an accepted-through-practice but ignored-in-theory relationship to constant change. Part of capitalism’s dynamism is the impact of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, a continual building and tearing down, developing and allowing to decay. The capitalist process transformed notions of family values, community continuity and tradition, and social order that evinced a conservative worldview. Contained in the materials concerning Bechtel, Jr.’s accession from his father expressed this problem of tradition versus change. In fact, both status quo and change were celebrated within the capitalists’ vision of a sane, orderly, economically healthy world order. Progress was desired, assumed and required.
Bechtel’s astounding growth in the postwar era mirrored the global expansion of other U.S. multinationals, and 1960s optimism quickly turned to anxiety in the 1970s. Nowhere were fears and frustrations on this new MNC phenomenon better expressed than in a broad variety of congressional and United Nations investigations. The longest and most comprehensive examinations took place over four years in Senator Frank Church’s Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations and Foreign Policy. Senator Church initiated the proceedings on March 20, 1973 with an opening statement that demanded of his fellow congressmen, and of Americans more generally, to finally achieve some understanding of this new entity called the multinational corporation. In May 1972 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator Fulbright, decided to react to prevailing popular turmoil over multinational activities and open a several-year inquiry into the role of multinationals and United States foreign policy. Their first hearings investigated allegations that the International Telephone & Telegraph Company (ITT) improperly influenced the federal government, internal politics in Chile, and the CIA in order to protect their interests against expropriation. Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, presidential candidate and ultimate victor during the era, repeatedly declared during Chilean elections that he was going to nationalize core industries and utilities. ITT tried to influence the elections. After Allende’s victory, he began his expropriation agenda, and still ITT worked to block his efforts, and accomplish whatever it could to protect their investments, including ensure it could collect from U.S.-government-backed insurance against expropriation or war in foreign countries.
On March 18, 1976, after the multinational subcommittee completed its investigations and had been “watered down,” Church ran for President, along with Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan and a host of other candidates. The senator was critical of multinational corporate activities at a time when they were little understood and had yet to enter mainstream consciousness. Church’s subcommittee work, in fact, coupled with the work of radical economic historian Stephen Hymer and the Yale Economic Growth Center, and the proliferation of academic and popular texts on multinationals in the 1970s, went a long way toward educating Americans about not only multinationals, but also the multiple critiques of activists who followed in the corporate wake. In speeches, Church claimed that, as president, he would “stop stimulating the movement of American capital to foreign lands.” He went on to build a new kind of narrative about American life. “During the past two decades,” he charged, “American multinational corporations have invested $200 billion abroad, in the most modern manufacturing plants that American technology can design. In the process, older plants in our own country have been displaced, at an annual average loss of 150,000 jobs a year. It is no accident that the United States is presently victimized by unemployment twice as high as that of any other industrial nation.” The now-familiar story of jobs going overseas at the expense of American workers, from a labor or anti-globalization perspective, began at this time.
Economic stagflation in the middle of the decade, a postindustrial landscape in American cities such as Trenton and Detroit, and the threat of domestic workers being replaced by cheap labor overseas exposed a new world. The globalizing elements Church referred to were only partly explained by public policy. Rather, they were the concrete manifestations of the capitalist/corporate imperative. The 1970s were a moment when the American nation began to apprehend the global, a new perspective that began in the postwar period and reached massive suffusion by 1976, the year of the Bicentennial. Americans asked fresh questions about nationhood as they prepared to celebrate their civic birthday, and many of their answers evinced a demise of American political power in the world and a more integrated worldspace in which the United States was but one piece to a complex puzzle.
The GOP and conservative press aggressively reacted against the multinational subcommittee’s work. The Wall Street Journal lauded former Attorney General John Mitchell and ITT President Harold Geneen for not giving “even a fraction of an inch to Senate Democrats” on the multinational subcommittee. The committee, in addition to probing ITT actions in Chile, looked at links between the Republican Party and government settlements of antitrust cases against the company. Conservatives pointed out, in the press and before the Senate Judiciary Committee, that Democrats routinely accepted cash from large corporations after settling antitrust cases out of court. Corporations and their conservative allies intensively lobbied the government in order to influence politicians and policy on all sides of the ideological spectrum. One such group was the Council of the Americas, founded in 1965 by David Rockefeller, which foreshadowed President Clinton’s 1990s neoliberal NAFTA era by pursuing free trade and democracy throughout the Western Hemisphere. The collective response of conservative and capitalist elites during this period indicated the difficulties of achieving their agenda, and the nature of the conditional political battles that raged through the country and the region. The unforeseeable results of such struggles played out in politics, markets, legal and civil spheres, and in broader society.
The capitalist vision and multinational moment were also about calculators. After several hearings on petroleum companies, the subcommittee shifted its focus to American businessmen opening up economic pathways in communist countries. The Soviet Union sessions investigated the role of American business and trade relationship with the eastern bloc and detente, a topic that was a key transformational aspect of the multinational moment. Calculators, for J. Fred Bucy, Executive Vice President of Texas Instruments, represented incredible technological advances for American consumers, but also integrated circuit technology for other uses, especially advanced weaponry. The Texas Instruments executive warned the committee about potential Soviet applications of calculator technology. Bucy expressed his concerns about Soviets playing one corporation off another with the lure of exclusive access to the Soviet market, primarily in order to gain the “know-how” necessary for advanced operations of the technology. The members of the committee agreed with him, murmuring their collective incredulity that Americans could sell technological know-how to the communists. Yet, a thriving business continued between the “opposing blocs,” transcending that era of heightened ideological rhetoric, including that of Bucy’s Texas Instruments.
In addition to expressions of caution about doing business in the Eastern Bloc, corporate executives presented visions of international consumerism as world peace. Donald Kendall, president of PepsiCo and Chairman of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade and Economic Council, and other businessmen were constantly worried about losing enterprise opportunities to the Europeans, and this justified their excursions. Senator Percy contributed his own insights “on this whole phenomenon, consumerism sweeping the Eastern European countries. I think Crackerjack has the slogan, ‘The more you eat, the more you want.’ Isn’t that almost a phenomenon we have seen worldwide. It is not restricted to any nationality or religious faith, belief, or background, once they start seeing what consumer goods can do in bringing a better way of life.” Kendall continued to speak of the benefits of Pepsi in communist countries, and their marketing campaigns in places like Poland and Russia. Percy asked Kendall whether he saw this spectacle as a “continuing trend,” and whether there will be “more of that because that will help create the consumer-oriented economy?” Kendall of course answered in the affirmative, both senators and businessmen engaging in prescient theorizing about real-world conditions in the economic sphere that would eventually explain Berlin in 1989. The subcommittee also included documentation on the USA-USSR Trade and Economic Council, which segued to Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski of Columbia University and soon-to-be President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor.
Gulf Oil decided that its best strategy in the hearings was to admit that it offered and delivered bribes in many countries around the world, numbering in the millions of dollars. Its argument was that ethical standards vary around the world, that there “is no universal standard,” and that they were “forced” to make contributions, in many cases against their will. Gulf begged the senate subcommittee to “enact legislation” that would help them avoid such pitfalls in the future. Legislation prohibiting foreign contributions would help companies like Gulf Oil resist foreign pressures to make such donations. Gulf shifted the blame to the foreign context of doing business in other countries, and then requested that Congress help them fight this global, evil practice. Their strategy was a major success. The senators loved it, and cried that Americans must fix this most pressing problem. “Senator Symington and myself have spent many, many years in industry,” claimed senator Percy, and so they knew what Gulf was talking about, understood the necessities of Gulf’s position negotiating the new global economy, and the tricky terrain of foreign governments and regulators. Senator Percy continued, “the importance of the hearings that we are holding today by the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations is really not to determine whether Gulf Oil did or did not contribute to a political process abroad. Gulf Oil has already admitted publicly that it has done so. Nor is this hearing designed to investigate whether Gulf Oil, its officers or directors, have committed an illegal act. There is no statutory prohibition against corporate political contributions abroad. The purpose of the hearing is to examine U.S. corporate business practices abroad and to attempt to ascertain the impact of these practices on U.S. foreign policy.” The chairman of Gulf, Mr. B. R. Dorsey, included one of his speeches for the public record. Society in the 1970s has changed, he claimed. “Today, society is a world concept . . . today we see the entirety of our world.” Dorsey claimed that business must take the central role in improving society’s problems,” and this included impressive rhetoric of social responsibility and the necessity of properly tending to labor issues.
The Senate Finance Committee also ran its own hearings into the perceived problems and benefits of multinational corporations. On Jun 1, 1972 the Subcommittee on International Trade issued a press release calling for papers that dealt with this new, perplexing issue – a meaningful attempt to first define and analyze, then locate society’s safe path through the strange, complex era. The collected papers represented a majority of business viewpoints, but also included a report from the AFL-CIO titled “An American Trade Union’s View of International Trade and Investment,” in which the general mainstream labor point of view was articulated. Leaving aside the Marxist international class interpretation presented by economist Stephen Hymer, the AFL-CIO perception, when compared with a broad cross section of labor organizations presented in contemporaneous literature, represented the dominant American labor perspective. Hymer showed how trade unions, by their very modus, could not compete in the newly complex and expanded international capitalist regime. Thus, perhaps viscerally and tacitly recognizing this fact, trade unions in the United States expanded their agitation during the 1970s. Increasingly, they appealed to the state, lobbying Congress for protective legislation, rather than to the corporations themselves. Washington Post writer Dan Morgan reported in 1973 that organized labor argued that multinationals outsourced American jobs, and yet “corporate leaders” maintained they created many other jobs because of their success abroad. Here was the nature of the conflict between labor and capital as it moved beyond the national to the international sphere. But the corporate-labor dialectic existed on a plane that probed much more deeply than this standard surface rhetoric.
Morgan’s article in the Washington Post covered the policy battles within the Congressional hearings, and encapsulated the divide between capital and labor. As the Church subcommittee hearings showed, American oil companies helped OPEC with its embargo. The oil companies claimed that they had no choice, as they would either be nationalized, or the business would go to Britain or other countries. Hymer also made note of this tendency of multinationals, in keeping with oligopoly theory – if they don’t do it, somebody else will. Morgan mentioned that “the U.N., the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Common Market Commission, the U.S. Tariff Commission, the Senate Finance Committee” and Senator Frank Church’s subcommittee were just some of the organizations probing the relationships between multinationals, laborers, and national governments. Structural restraints such as energy and food interested the congressional committees throughout the 1970s, as well as political factors like national security and American hegemony abroad. Congress wanted to ensure that corporations like Cargill, GE, GM, IBM and Gulf remained an element of American hegemony that continued to cultivate American power.
The political economic story of American multinationals in the postwar era included one of government injection of money and will, and then facilitation and protection over time. A company such as food giant Cargill participated in the Marshall Plan, and engaged in commodity movements across the ocean to Europe. It profited handsomely from postwar trade, and constructed pathways of economic activity that enabled further integration in the global sphere. After the first glow, perhaps, of economic engagement overseas, Cargill experienced competition, and the problems of “geography and time difference.” Cargill created a new arm of its operations, Tradax International, which it placed in Panama in order to “conduct our trading activities in the international grain market on the same tax footing available to our major competitors.” It was not long before the connective tissues of food movements and feeding populations intersected with marketability and power, and the government’s growing interest and nascent experience of its new dominance in the world. The federal government protected and encouraged trade in food and energy because of national interest concerns. The state and the corporation worked in concert to build a One World ordered upon state capitalism and free exchange as long as the free exchange was dictated by U.S. imperatives. Free markets did not exist when energy and food involved global connections, and new kinds of capital and commodity movements energized capitalist elite participation. The capitalist class helped ignite the postwar wave, and, backed by government incentives and cash, they rode the swell as far as they could while consolidating its fluid momentum. Capitalism in the postwar world involved energy and environment, food and shelter, and national and international negotiations.
Cargill’s congressional testimony disputed the subcommittee’s reports of food dominance by a handful of companies, and subsequent impact on foreign policy. Cargill saw a global network of transportation, information, and communications; a broad corporate diaspora that imagined a world community. According to Cargill’s self-image, the company played a tiny part in a wide planetary spread of competing interests. National security, in their collective mind, necessitated peaceful production, exchange and consumption of foodstuffs. For Cargill, freely engaging in enterprise would benefit the U.S. in productivity, growth, and sharing in global peace. The company believed there was nothing sinister about their activities, and, in fact, they were central to world peace and thus national security. According to the Minneapolis-based company, it contributed to an intensely competitive and totally integrated world system, a vast machine of interdependence, rights and responsibilities that few people understood or appreciated. Cargill’s activities appeared to be under the radar because nobody bothered to look. Since the Marshall Plan, they were simply minding their own business.
Grain companies largely stored, marketed and distributed the basic unit of food without drawing attention to themselves. Though the largest private corporation on earth, Cargill remained anonymous – that is, until policymakers discovered that it exported and imported grain to and from the Soviet Union. Senator Church, other congressmen, and indeed much of the public evinced outrage about USSR-US food trading relationships that involved some of the world’s largest multinationals. Congressional staff researcher Richard Gilmore went to Russia on behalf of the subcommittee to investigate commercial relations between the two superpowers, especially focused on grain, shipping, and elements of détente. The role of the state as related the corporation was explored at incredible length and depth, and consensus, epistemological or ontological, hardly was reached. Part of the reason for this disjuncture was that corporations and global capitalism continued to shift and change at this period, as did relations between states in the international sphere. Cargill dominated US grain exports and moved tons of foodstuffs out of the United States and into the world commodity streams, which included satisfying Soviet feeding needs during a period of growing population, droughts, and inefficient domestic production.
The companies interrogated by the subcommittee expressed negative reactions to any sort of international monitoring system for food and energy. Time and again, no matter the industry, whether concerning food or labor, corporations did not respond favorably to congressional inquiries about global regulation of any aspect of the system. What should we do about international labor, finance, food, energy, law, the various committees queried. Congress, scholars, and pundits attempted to solve the problems of the new global age. In “USSR and Grain,” Gilmore wrote that “Soviet officials expressed little willingness to participate in any initiative at this time for the establishment of an international grain reserve system or for a UN sponsored effort in food assistance and information sharing.” The USSR attempted to maintain its own sovereign movements in the global sphere, as did American multinational corporations.
Other corporations also saw themselves as contributing positively to the world order. IBM’s self-image, as we saw with Texas Instruments and its transistors, was as a creator of “high technology” and a vital provider of technology to the domestic and world economy. Technology existed as innovator, and as instrumental for beneficial social change, and “is acknowledged to be one of the greatest strengths of the U.S. economy.” In order to impress the committee, Jones provided vacuum tubes used in early computing, and provided statistics of calculation ability and the cost of each calculation. He continued moving down the scale to great power and smaller circuitry. Jones offered the senators a sample silicon chip developed in 1958, and then another even more diminutive, for which he provided a magnifying glass in order to see the circuitry, in addition to the cost per multiplication. The global vision of IBM illustrated an attempt to encourage, and yet grapple with, rapid and continual technological change contained within a sphere of global competition. “Generations of products are measured in a few brief years,” and therefore, “a company – or, indeed, a nation – which fails to keep apace of technological improvements and changes in marketing techniques” may fall behind in the agonistic relationship of multiple players in integrated world markets. Jones assumed the cooperation, if not the union, of corporation and nation in this particular struggle, and encouraged the government not to forget the requirements of competition between nations.
Given one of the principal concerns of the era, and a major vein of investigation in many of the senate hearings, Jones emphasized that IBM’s technological advance did not result in fewer jobs. He equated his understanding of “high technology” to a leading manufacturer of automobiles. “If you compare the dollar revenue and the number of people of IBM to the dollar revenue and the number of people in General Motors, you will find that IBM is more labor intensive than General Motors by that yardstick.” As had many of the executives who testified, Jones underlined his belief that Congress should not intervene with protective measures in an effort to save American jobs during this period of heightened anxiety. Success at global competition was not dependent on the number of jobs or wage costs, he said, but is “more dependent on our ability to maintain a technological edge” and “on our willingness to innovate.” Staying a step ahead, coming up with new products, and mastering the art of obsolescence allowed IBM to maintain profits and contribute to social well-being. The capitalist vision, reflecting Daniel Bell’s “cultural contradiction of capitalism,” expressed a conflict between the social and political status quo, of cultural “tradition,” and the fundamental need for constant risk-taking and the fact that “no industry is – or should be – static.” Continual innovation remained “the facts of life.” Continual innovation also wrought social change and threats to status quo stasis, which conservative businessmen ultimately were able to accept. When considering world trade, the federal government “should avoid thinking in terms of days gone by, when handcrafts and high labor content were the general rule in American factories.” But in the post-civil rights and post-Vietnam era, the impulses generated after World War II should continue. Government, so that economic health and growth would continue, should support industrial enterprise and innovation. And the drive to encourage and harness growth was the entire point of capitalist innovation and “creative destruction.”
State and capital as a whole, even or especially considering the government investigations of the 1970s, were united in the general expansionist impulse after the war, an outward-facing vision of global peace through hegemony, notions of freedom, democracy and liberty of contract with the terms set by corporate imperatives and dominated by capitalist elites who moved effortlessly between the public and private sphere. One element of this fluid movement between corporations and government service was indicated by the fact that many of the senators interested in the topic of MNCs were corporate executives themselves. The interviewers and the interviewees distinctly were members of the same club. Federal government investigations into MNC activity never seriously threatened corporate imperatives. Rather, thousands of testimonial pages merely served to illustrate a business exceptionalism that truly moved beyond national sovereignty and increasingly showed how the state was a global player among many.
Business pragmatism combined with business exceptionalism to create a transnational landscape that increased as the twentieth century unfolded. Bribes from Lockheed, Gulf Oil and ITT in particular created political and popular concern, resulting in attempts by President Carter to legislate control of such handouts. Gulf Oil and Mobil executives spoke forthrightly to the panel about monies that went to Italian parties because first, it was legal, and second, it was a normal way of conducting business around the world. Whether to the Libyan royal family, to Chilean center-right parties from ITT, or the bribes paid out by Lockheed Corporation, American companies and their subsidiaries adapted business practices to reflect on-the-ground realities and to actively create those realities. The corporate vision entailed an understanding that business exceptionalism prevailed, and one engaged in political economy wherever with whomever, from Communist to right wing dictator.
The capitalist vision displayed in hearings through the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s reflected free market thinking and a firm belief in boundaryless movement of capital, labor and goods. But elite businessmen viewed their activities as necessary for global prosperity, growth and peace. Capitalists saw their involvement in world trade as the foundation of peaceful integration and rising material standards for all people in the world. Thomas Murphy, Vice Chairman of the Board of General Motors, testified that General Motors had significant experience in global movements, and that the company’s experience solidified their social and economic interpretations. “Based on over 60 years of active participation in the world market,” he told the senators, “that the reduction of barriers to world trade and investment is essential” to the vision of a peaceful, integrated world. According to Murphy, though, this particular vision entailed the global production of automobiles, radical social and geographical change because of the car, and environmental problems that resulted from astounding new technologies. Consumer society and global shipping relied on new engineering and production methods that increased global prosperity and growth while at the same time expanding the dangers with which people live today. Furthermore, the political economy of the automobile demands that scholars pay careful attention to petroleum sources and their control.
Murphy reflected the self-image of many capitalists during the multinational moment. “Contrary to the endless stream of charges critics have hurled at multinational business firms,” he said, “I am convinced they have been a powerful force for progress.” Further, he noted that world trade increased living standards around the globe, and in the United States. He provided evidence showing that U.S. manufacturing jobs had in fact increased during the late 1960s and early 1970s, contrary to claims by labor organizations. In 1966, Frederic Donner, GM chairman, gave a lecture at Columbia University that illustrated the capitalists’ global vision during a time of intense anxiety surrounding multinational activity. “World-wide enterprise is potential a most effective element in a world-wide desire for economic growth,” he announced. And, multinational enterprise in an era of freedom “provides an important element in the search for world peace.” Murphy concluded his statement before the committee by declaring, “we dare not turn back from a world which is seeking to find solutions to many urgent problems. In meeting this challenge we are convinced that the multinational firm – competitive world enterprise – offers a resource whose value we are only beginning to sense.” Throughout his testimony, though, assumptions of perpetual growth existed as the panacea that would create a better world.
Fears of American multinationals taking jobs and tax money abroad led Congress to consider legislation to inhibit investments in foreign countries. Capitalists complained about these proscriptive measures, of course, and claimed that state meddling in free movement of capital created more damage to global peace and domestic living standards than good. The Foreign Trade and Investment Act of 1973 (S. 151) alerted many American multinationals to one aspect of national anxieties about MNCs. Murphy, in his role of helping the committee learn about multinationals, also lobbied on behalf of GM. “The obvious intent of S.151 and similar bills is to discourage overseas investment.” Removal of tax incentives harmed American firms’ competitive advantage, and basically led to corporate tax rates that existed during wartime. Again, the automobile and world demand for private vehicles illustrated the tensions between state, capital and ecology engaged in a multilectic of world historical proportions. Mirroring most corporate arguments for global free markets and capital movement, Murphy noted that repealing the tax credit on foreign investments would create a vacuum that “would be quickly filled” by companies such as Toyota, Volkswagen and Fiat. General Motors in the early 1970s felt competitive pressures “in all world areas.” And wherever local populations desired cars, these companies aimed to fulfill their thirst for this democratized commodity that, as this essay highlights, was tied to iron ore extraction, expropriation realities, steel production, global work forces, and social activism on a newly global scale.
Already the corporations, even if their leaders did not desire anti-nationalism realities, had moved into the transnational sphere. The structural mechanics of the envisioned machine, the natural order of this process, necessitated a beyond-the-nation construction of political economy. The very terms “multinational,” “international,” and “transnational” began to reflect a picture of a new world space. Capitalists spoke, thought and acted within this new understanding, representing these specific changes also while creating them. Multinational corporations as investigated by the anxious West in the 1960s and 1970s reflected and performed the history of global enterprise. Their values and cultural systems drove these developments, changes and growth with all their power, while at the same time trending toward complications with conservative ideals. Republicans and Democrats alike helped construct this new world order, and were absorbed by it as well. As powerful as American had become, as broad as its hegemony had spread, it, too, was pulled in the direction of larger forces that it had helped create.
Energy capitalists such as El Paso Gas and Bechtel testified to the Church committee that they were concerned with shortages, as was everyone else in the country, as was the Federal Power Commission, but defended their relationships with overseas nations and companies. El Paso imagined a world connected by a grid of pipelines and transportation networks. Their planet already was integrated, in the real world and in the imaginary. Still, on the surface, Republicans and Democrats evinced fears about doing business with the Soviets, and with removing jobs and productive capacity from the domestic realm. The Senate as of May 15, 1974 barred “the granting of Export-Import Bank credits” unless the President and the corporations involved could prove that this relationship, backed by the federal government and the American taxpayer would be in the “national interest.” In a New York Times editorial titled “That Soviet Gas,” the Times criticized Nixon for pushing the “joint development of Siberian natural gas reserves” without public debate, and questioned that the United States energy requirements would be “served by exporting American investment capital for development of dubious foreign energy resources.” Government hands existed all over the negotiations and the Export-Import Bank documents examined for this essay. The Federal Power Commission and the Maritime Administration subsidized natural gas tanker construction, so that the project began to look more and more like a government-directed program to procure energy from the Russian gas fields in order to supply American energy needs. Nevertheless, the energy companies insisted that the market mechanisms of “free exchange” and a transnational vision would deliver peace through cooperation between the USSR and the USA. President Carter and activists such as Ralph Nader entered this conversation with their own interpretations of universal order. But their historical positions during these political and social struggles ended up severely compromised, if not vanquished.
Nader’s activism resided squarely within global market hegemony, and his agitation consisted of reforms that he hoped would improve the system that the capitalists already had established. Nader was a creation of the capitalist vision, and its contemporary victory, its consolidation of power and social influence. During the crises of the 1970s, Nader-style consumer advocacy, the Nestle Boycott, and other movements exploded to the surface in a cultural spasm that evinced the social anxieties of the moment. Carter would not overcome these diffuse concerns and the crisis itself. Capitalists and visions of global growth, massive deficits, defense spending and economic expansion, couched in a program of national self-love, temporarily gained the upper hand. The national unit continued to attenuate into a world integration that Reagan and his coevals could not alter. Nor did they really understand their role in the contradictions of total growth on a planetary scale. The ambiguities of capitalism coursed through these anxiety debates, and contests between state and capital.
Nader was not a challenge to the capitalist vision; he was an expression of it. Nader’s citizen was in fact the capitalist’s citizen. Both capitalist and activist envisioned a united world, and possessed a notion of species consciousness. Both camps and nearly all permutations within and beyond hoped to create a better world using the tools that the capitalists made. This universe, of course, was constructed upon and within state power. State and corporation explained their unique marriage, their “textbook definition of corporate socialism,” within the senate hearing rooms, within the global market, and with the vast array of activists agitating and expressing concerns about the new capitalist paradigm.
President Carter entered the presidency and this world of petroleum problems, energy concerns, and economic crisis in 1976. A historical struggle between capitalism’s push for total growth and the idea of limits erupted to the surface of American society and culture. Doubts about deregulation, the realities of inflation and high unemployment mixed with fears about overpopulation and global pollution. In the short term, ecologically minded activists lost this particular political and social struggle. In Carter’s July 15, 1979 “malaise speech,” the president expressed a pessimistic view of the state of national and global affairs. He expressed a national “crisis of confidence” that penetrated “the very heart and soul of our national will.” Americans would have to change their driving, living and even eating habits. People would have to “drive less and in smaller cars while paying more for oil,” and, we should remind, the nation mandated they drive fifty-five miles an hour. Who won this particular political, cultural and social struggle between growth and limits? In 1981, of course, Ronald Reagan entered the White House with a different global vision entirely. And by President Clinton’s era in the 1990s, Americans could drive fast once more.