Description
Based on new archival research, G. Williams Domhoff challenges popular conceptions of the 1930's New Deal. Arguing instead that this period was one of increasing corporate dominance in government affairs, affecting the fate of American workers up to the present day. While FDR's New Deal brought sweeping legislation, the tide turned quickly after 1938. From that year onward nearly every major new economic law passed by Congress showed the mark of corporate dominance. Domhoff accessibly portrays documents of the Committee's vital influence in the halls of government, supported by his interviews with several of its key employees and trustees. Domhoff concludes that in terms of economic influence, liberalism was on a long steady decline, despite two decades of post-war growing equality, and that ironically, it was the successes of the civil rights, feminist, environmental, and gay-lesbian movements-not a new corporate mobilisation-that led to the final defeat of the liberal-labour alliance after 1968.
Table of Contents
Introduction The Myth of a Postwar Liberal-Labor Ascendancy 1 Demonstrating Corporate Dominance 2 The Rise and Sudden Decline of the Liberal-Labor Alliance, 1934-1938 3 Leadership for Corporate Moderates, 1939-1945 4 The Postwar Years and the Truman Administration 5 Corporate Moderate Frustrations: The Eisenhower Years 6 Corporate Moderate Successes in the Kennedy Years 7 Corporate Moderation and More Success: The Johnson Years 8 New Sources of Conflict between Corporations and Unions 9 Corporate Policy Success and Economic Failure in the First Nixon Administration 10 The Rise of the Business Roundtable and Tension within the CED, 1973-1976 11 Corporate Triumphs during the Carter Administration 12 The Reagan Culmination, 1981-1984 13 The Road to the Great Recession
