The Business of America

Graham Thompson

Description

The Business of America examines the complex linking of business and nationhood in post-war United States literature against the backdrop of changing concepts of the nation in the field of American Studies.



The first part of the book examines how white male literary culture has been largely hostile to business during this period and how it has represented transnational shifts in the nature of business as threats to supposedly American values like the individual, the family, or freedom. The book charts the way that such an uneasiness towards business relies upon a discourse about America, business and empire that is increasingly untenable in the post-war world.



By way of comparison, The Business of America looks at how literature by women and by writers from different racial, ethnic and sexual groups often deals with business from the more localised angle of work. Graham Thompson shows how this attention to work provides a less abstract and more oppositional approach to the connection between business and America.
Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One. White Male Literary Culture

1. Errands in the Post-War/Cold War Jungle

2. Entropy, Postmodernism and Global Systems

3. Postnational Recovery Narratives and Beyond

Part Two. The Difference of Gender, Race and Sexuality

4. Objectivist Fantasies and the Industry of Writing and Piracy

5. Assimilation, Citizenship and Post-Ethnicity

6. Queer Profits and Losses

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849644990
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Business of America

The Cultural Production of a PostWar Nation

Graham Thompson

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Graham Thompson 2004

The right of Graham Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

0 7453 1809 6 hardback 0 7453 1808 8 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Thompson, Graham, 1965– The business of America : the cultural production of a post-war nation / Graham Thompson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0–7453–1809–6 –– ISBN 0–7453–1808–8 (pbk.) 1. Business anthropology––United States. 2. Corporate culture––United States. 3. United States––Civilization. 4. United States––Study and teaching. I. Title.

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GN450.8.T48 2004 306.4'0973––dc22

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2003022871

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

For Blanche and Karen

172 185

1 2 3

Part II

27 53 74

Part I

Introduction

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5 6

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Notes Index

103 125 149

Objectivist Fantasies and the Industry of Writing and Piracy Assimilation, Citizenship and Post-Ethnicity Queer Profits and Losses

Errands in the Post-War/Cold War Jungle Entropy, Postmodernism and Global Systems Postnational Recovery Narratives and Beyond

The Difference of Gender, Race and Sexuality

Acknowledgements

White Male Literary Culture

Contents

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Anne Beech at Pluto Press for her patience and support and to Emma for her own brand of ‘encouragement’ that helped me get there in the end.

ix

Introduction

THE BUSINESS OF BUSINESS

On 17 January 1925, United States president Calvin Coolidge stood up to address the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, DC. Although his subject was ‘The Press Under a Free Government’, the speech is best remembered now for an aphorism Coolidge introduced to the cultural imaginary of the nation. ‘The chief business of the American people’, he told his audience, ‘is 1 business.’ The repetition of the more familiar paraphrased version of this remark – ‘the business of America is business’ – has turned Coolidge’s observation into a familiar slogan. But it is a slogan whose apparent simplicity disguises a powerful argument about the way that the relationship between business and nationhood has been conceived in the United States; a simplicity that also makes the slogan ideologically malleable. Capable of being used to naturalise and defend the operations of United States business on the one hand, on the other it can also be used to criticise these operations on the grounds that the problem with life in the United States is that everything else is subordinated to the demands of business. This book argues that these conflicting ideological values can be heard echoing through post-war United States literature. They are most evident wherever writers directly represent and engage the various elements of business culture – its executives, managers and employees, or the physical and mental conditions of employment and entrepreneurship. Here, for example, one might place Arthur Miller’s canonicalDeath of a Salesman, Sloan Wilson’s best-sellingThe Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Ayn Rand’s impassionedAtlas Shrugged, or Douglas Coupland’s zeitgeistyMicroserfs. But such conflicting ideological values also inform other texts at a fundamental level, acting as the narrative unconscious of works traditionally appreciated for qualities other than their treatment of business: books like Norman Mailer’sThe Naked and the Dead, Thomas Pynchon’sThe Crying of Lot 49, Carson McCullers’sThe Ballad of the Sad Caféand Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless. The aim of this book is to try and understand not only what drives this preoccupation with business, but also to

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The Business of America

study the various strategies that writers have used to negotiate their relationship to the discourses of business. By the discourses of business I mean three things. First of all, I mean the way that business as a theme has been written and talked about in the United States, by presidents, by social critics, by journalists, and by novelists and playwrights. Secondly, I mean the way that the historical accumulation of this collective input has fashioned a set of rules that govern the way successive generations can think about business. These rules need not be mutually supportive. Coolidge’s aphorism is an example of how business might be interpreted positively or negatively in the discourses of business. What matters is that business is conceived within a recognisable historical framework of ideas and themes. Think, for example, of the way that ‘industry’ as a means of succeeding in business has exercised various commentators. Benjamin Franklin in ‘The Way to Wealth’ has Poor Richard advise his audience that ‘Sloth makes all things 2 difficult, but industry all easy  drive thy business, let not that drive thee’, while J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur suggested that Americans were ‘all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and 3 unrestrained, because each person works for himself’. It is this spirit that one can see embraced in Horatio Alger’s self-help stories of the nineteenth century and even in the political rhetoric of black leaders like Booker T. Washington. InUp From Slavery, Washington writes about educating black children with practical knowledge of business but also of imbuing in them ‘the spirit of industry, thrift, and 4 economy’. This is not to deny, of course, the important difference between the subject positions of each of these writers, but merely to emphasise the way that a discourse of business is created, and enshrined as it is repeated. Finally, I mean by the discourses of business the way that the specialised and professionalised languages of business become tropes and metaphors capable of being transposed outside of a strictly business environment. When words like industry, trading, investment, expansion, organisation and inflation, for example, are used in non- business contexts they carry with them the legacy of their origins into the new context. It is from within the confines of these discourses of business that many post-war literary texts seek to define their themes and characters. One possible approach to these acts of definition would be to consider the discourses of business as superstructural manifestations of capitalist organisation. In terms of some of the books mentioned

Introduction

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above, this would mean bolting the themes of war, postmodernity, sexuality and gender onto an underpinning capitalist base in order to observe what Richard Godden has described as the ‘shards of redundant logic and traditions of resistance littered across the marketplace’ as capitalism is transformed by technological innovations 5 in the areas of both production and consumption. Whilst sympathetic to such an approach and willing to draw on the work of critics who have attempted such analyses, the objective I have set myself here is somewhat different. What will coordinate my approach is the link that Coolidge made between business and the ‘American people’, and which the paraphrased version of his remark makes between business and ‘America’. This book will examine, then, the way that post-war United States literature has, throughout its engagement with the discourses of business, imagined the complex signifier ‘America’; a signifier that has been, and continues to be, the subject of continual social, cultural and rhetorical reconstruction. The conflicting ideological values that I have suggested are part and parcel of a slogan like ‘The business of America is business’, suggest that what is at stake ideologically is the configuration of ‘America’ itself. One way to start thinking about the implications of this for post-war literature is to return Coolidge’s aphorism to the largely forgotten speech that was its original context and see just how he performed the construction of ‘America’ and the ‘American people’.

THE BUSINESS OF IDEALISM

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century – when the motivations of national and global newsgathering and media con- glomerates increasingly generate popular, governmental and academic scrutiny – there is much in Coolidge’s speech that appears prescient. Indeed, it rehearses a contemporary debate about the responsibili- ties facing newspapers – and, for us, other media forms – in their twin roles as sites of cultural information exchange and as moneymaking enterprises. Coolidge constructed his speech as a riposte against public concern with ‘the commercialism of the press’ and the impartiality of the information disseminated when ‘great newspapers are great business enterprises earning large profits and controlled by men of wealth’. Promptly dismissing these concerns, Coolidge declared ‘it is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation, is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences’. His justification

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The Business of America

was that only by understanding the ‘producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering’ in which people were daily engaged could a newspaper hope to fulfil its democratic, civilising role. And in a piece of rhetorical mirroring that places his earlier comments about ‘the chief business of the American people’ into sharp perspective, in his concluding remarks Coolidge maintained that ‘the chief ideal of the American people is idealism … I could not truly criticize the vast importance of the counting room, but my ultimate faith I would place in the high idealism of the editorial room of the American newspaper.’ Ironically, then, one of the most famous declarations about business in the United States, far from being an endorsement of the primacy of business in the construction of ‘America’, was actually an attempt to refute this conviction. There are things for Coolidge that should be desired ahead of the creation of wealth. ‘It is only those who do not understand our people,’ he argued, ‘who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives.’ The political and national freedom Coolidge emphasises here he made a corollary of economic freedom more explicitly elsewhere. A year earlier, at a meeting of the Business Organization of the Government of which he was Chief Executive, Coolidge told his fellow members that ‘any oppression laid upon the people by excessive taxation, any disregard of their right to hold and enjoy the property which they have rightfully acquired, would be fatal to freedom’. Coolidge’s quest for freedom in the service of a civilised ‘America’ – and he admitted it demanded ‘a constant and mighty effort’ – makes business only themeansby which higher goals may be achieved. To paraphrase, then, one could claim that for Coolidge ‘The business of business is America.’ Coolidge’s emphasis upon business as an enabling force together with the link between economic and political freedom is worth bearing in mind when thinking about the negotiation with business in one particular line of post-war literature. White male literary culture, on first examination at least, seems to have been straightforwardly antagonistic towards business during this period. Emily Stipes Watt has upbraided this group of writers, with only minor exception, for its denigration of business. She notes that ‘Most businessmen depicted in post-1945 television and serious literature are still characterized as greedy, unethical, and immoral … whether they are JR of William 6 Gaddis’sJR: A Novelor J.R. of “Dallas”.’ Indeed, it has rarely been the case that the explicit ideological objectives of business or businessmen have been ratified by white male literary culture in the