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Fortune's Business Gentlemen: Culture and Corporate Liberalism in the Early 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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Fortune portentously announced its aim in the first issue in February 1930: “Fortune's purpose is to reflect Industrial Life in ink and paper and word and picture as the finest skyscraper reflects it in stone and steel and architecture.” The magazine's copious use of painting, literary writing, and artistic photography gave it a luxurious feel that few early reviewers failed to praise. The advertising firm Young and Rubicam, for instance, applauded the magazine's aestheticization of business: “A Toast to You Fortune … You've taken what are sometimes called ‘prosaic business’ and ‘sordid industry’ – you have viewed them with imagination, insight, and beauty … No longer is business a column of figures, or work a daily grind. Here is epic enterprise, a panorama of romance, adventure, conquest – with beauty in factories and derricks.” Upgrading the visual and textual environment of the business magazine, Fortune provided business with the elegance of the aristocracy and the allure of a Hollywood star.

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

NOTES

1. “Purpose,” Fortune, 02 1930, 38Google Scholar; and an advertisement for Young, and Rubicam, , Fortune, 02 1930, 105Google Scholar.

2. Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 162, 179Google Scholar; Young, Owen D. and Cason, Charles, quoted in Krooss, Herman E., Executive Opinion: What Business Leaders Said and Thought on Economic Issues, 1920s–1960s (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 43, 42Google Scholar; Luce, Henry, “The Tycoon,” in The Ideas of Henry Luce, ed. Jessup, JohnNew York: Atheneum, 1969, 223–24Google Scholar; and Elson, Robert, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–41 (New York, 1968), 130Google Scholar.

3. Prospectus quoted in Elson, , Time Inc., 130Google Scholar.

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5. Luce, Henry, quoted in Elson, , Time Inc., 141Google Scholar; Luce, Henry, “The Press is Peculiar,” Saturday Review of Literature, 03 7, 1931, 646Google Scholar; and “New York in the Third Winter,” Fortune, 01 1932, 41Google Scholar.

6. Luce, , quoted in Elson, , Time Inc., 127, 126Google Scholar; and “Dissonances,” Fortune, 02 1930, 25Google Scholar. The first column in the first issue of Fortune was a collection of disparate quotes about business, materialism, success, and technology, from sources as varied as St. Paul, John Dewey, and the advertiser Ernest Elmo Calkins. In repeating the Beards' words, Fortune certainly does not suggest that it agreed with other writings of the Beards, or vice versa. However, it does provide a nice example of the magazine annexing the cultural capital of the intellectual and artistic community for its own purposes.

7. “Obsolete Men,” Fortune, 12 1932, 25Google Scholar; and Berle, Adolf and Means, Gardiner, The Modern Corporation and Private Property New York: Macmillan, 1932, 351Google Scholar. Berle and Means shared with corporate liberals a sense of the outdatedness of laissez-faire economics and a trust of professional managerial planning; they parted, however, with corporate liberals in their belief that government would have to take the economic reigns in order to achieve a rational economy.

8. Luce, Henry, “Aristocracy and Motives,” in Jessup, , Ideas of Henry Luce, 96Google Scholar; Gifford, Walter, quoted in Krooss, , Executive Opinion, 4243Google Scholar; and “Vanishing Backyards,” Fortune, 05 1930, 80Google Scholar.

9. “Cloak and Suit,” Fortune, 06 1930, 92Google Scholar; and “Oil Abroad: Teagle,” Fortune, 03 1931, 35, 35Google Scholar. On business' efforts to squelch competition, see Gordon, Colin, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15Google Scholar. Labor also threatened to undermine market stability in the 1920s. Low worker loyalty created large turnover costs, strikes were unpredictable and expensive, and different wage scales within a single industry increased cutthroat competition and made it difficult for a single company to institute high wages in the interest of consumerism. By instituting company unions, corporations hoped to increase worker loyalty and increase communication between workers and management without abdicating control over the workplace. But even outside unions were attractive to some corporate liberals. “Cloak and Suit” argued that unions had helped to control vicious competition in the garment industry by driving cheaper producers out of business. General Electric's president, Gerard Swope, even contacted the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1926 in hopes that the large union might create a single union for the electrical industry. Swope believed this would reduce management costs as well as guarantee “effective worker self-regulation and good behavior” (the conservative, crafts-based AFL though, refused to consider industrial unionism).

10. “Aluminum Company of America,” Fortune, 03 1930, 68Google Scholar; and “Columbia and United,” Fortune, 07 1931, 7778Google Scholar.

11. Cason, , quoted in Krooss, , Executive Opinion, 4445Google Scholar; and Overstreet, H. A., “Business as a Creative Unity,” in Business Management as a Profession, ed. Metcalf, Henry (Chicago: A. W. Shaw, 1927), 372Google Scholar.

12. Luce, “Aristocracy,” 99.

13. Ibid., 101; and Luce, “The Tycoon,” 221, 222, 223.

14. Bogart, Michelle, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 125Google Scholar; and Marchand, Roland, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 146, 167, 192Google Scholar. For more on window display, see Leach, William, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture New York: Pantheon, 1993Google Scholar; and Harris, Neil, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar. For more on symbolic advertising, see Marchand, , Advertising the American DreamGoogle Scholar, and Lears, Jackson, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America New York: Basic, 1994Google Scholar.

15. Advertisement for Fortune, Fortune, 04 1930, 137Google Scholar.

16. Elson, , Time Inc., 134–35, 141Google Scholar; and “A Note on Fortune,” Fortune, 02 1930, 180Google Scholar.

17. Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life New York: Alfred Knopf, 1963, 251Google Scholar.

18. “Maksoud of Kashan and Mrs. McCormick of Chicago,” Fortune, 10 1930, 46, 50Google Scholar.

19. “Sand Into Glass,” Fortune, 02 1930, 69Google Scholar; “Orchids,” Fortune, 02 1930, 97Google Scholar; and “Skyscrapers,” Fortune, 07 1930, 33Google Scholar.

20. “For $100,000,” Fortune, 05 1933, 66, 58Google Scholar; “Wine,” Fortune, 05 1930, 50Google Scholar; and “The Magnificence of Morgan,” Fortune, 10 1930, 98Google Scholar.

21. “Diamond v. Emerald, Ruby and Sapphire,” Fortune, 03 1930, 49Google Scholar.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. “Maksoud of Kashan,” 46; and “Diamond,” 51.

25. Bourne, Randolph, America's Coming-of-Age New York: Octagon, 1975, 111–12Google Scholar; and “Package as Merchandiser,” Fortune, 05 1931, 78Google Scholar. On the complications and tensions between artistic integrity and commercial ambition, 1890–1920, see Burns, Sarah, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996Google Scholar; Wilson, Christopher, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Dettmar, Kevin and Watts, Stephen, ed., Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996Google Scholar.

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27. Babbitt, Irving, “Democracy and Standards,” in Intellectual Alienation in the 1920's, ed. Plesur, Milton (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1970), 18Google Scholar; and Radway, Janice, A Feeling For Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997, 141Google Scholar.

28. Luce, “Aristocracy,” 100.

29. Burns, , Inventing the Modern Artist, 99, 35, 279Google Scholar.

30. “Package as Merchandiser,” Fortune, 05 1931, 78Google Scholar; and “Jade,” Fortune, 03 1931, 60Google Scholar.

31. “The Executive in His Office,” Fortune, 01 1931, 39Google Scholar; “Maksoud of Kashan,” 46; and “Ming,” Fortune, 07 1931, 68Google Scholar.

32. Benjamin, Walter, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, HannahNew York: Schocken, 1968, 61Google Scholar; “Wine,” 50; and “Ming,” 75.

33. “Eating and Drinking the Imperial Dinner,” Fortune, 04 1930, 6263Google Scholar.

34. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 60–61, 67; and “Rembrandt's Painting of Solomon's Mother,” Fortune, 06 1930, 62Google Scholar.

35. Galambos, Louis, The Public Image of Big Business in America, 1880–1940: A Quantitative Study in Social Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 195Google Scholar; Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt New York: Penguin, 1996, 74Google Scholar; Mencken, H. L., “The National Letters,” in H. L. Mencken, The American Scene, ed. Cairns, HuntingtonNew York: Alfred Knopf, 1965, 74Google Scholar; Burke, Kenneth, quoted in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Revolt of the Intellectuals,” in Intellectual Alienation in the 1920's, ed. Plesur, Milton (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1970), 76Google Scholar; and Dewey, John, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Plesur, , Intellectual Alienation, 22Google Scholar.

36. Veblen, Thorstein, The Engineers and the Price System New York: August M. Kelley, 1965Google Scholar.

37. Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems New York: Holt, 1927, 98Google Scholar.

38. “American Workingman,” Fortune, 08 1931, 54Google Scholar; and “A.T. & T. as Citizen,” Fortune, 10 1931, 69Google Scholar. On the critique of corporations as “soulless,” and business' response to this, see Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul.

39. Mencken, “The National Letters,” 89; and Luce, “Aristocracy,” 99.

40. “Rembrandt's Painting,” 122.

41. “Good Taste in Advertising,” Fortune, 03 1930, 6061Google Scholar.

42. Krooss, , Executive Opinion, 42Google Scholar.

43. Gordon, , New Deals, 132, 162Google Scholar.

44. “U.S. Corporate Management,” Fortune, 06 1933, 104, 102Google Scholar.