They recognized that business had hardly begun to tap its potential for wielding political power. Powell, Harlow, and others sought to replace the old boys’ club with a more modern, sophisticated, and diversified apparatus - one capable of advancing employers’ interests even under the most difficult political circumstances. “We had to prevent business from being rolled up and put in the trash can by that Congress.” “The danger had suddenly escalated,” Bryce Harlow, senior Washington representative for Procter & Gamble and one of the engineers of the corporate political revival was to say later. With Watergate leading to Nixon’s humiliating resignation and a spectacular Democratic victory in 1974, the situation grew even more dire. Powell wrote in 1971, but even after Nixon swept to a landslide reelection the following year, the legislative tide continued to come in. And as the 1970s progressed, the problems seemed to be getting worse. The explosion of policy activism, and rise of public interest groups like those affiliated with Ralph Nader, created a fundamental challenge. It relied mostly on personal contacts, and the main role of lobbyists in Washington was to troll for government contracts and tax breaks. Before the policy winds shifted in the ’60s, business had seen little need to mobilize anything more than a network of trade associations. Powell was just one of many who pushed to reinvigorate the political clout of employers. The two men were appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. Powell Jr., left, and another will be given to William Rehnquist, right, at a White House ceremony in Washington, D.C., Dec. President Richard Nixon holds a commission that he will present to Lewis F. that political power is necessary that such power must be assiduously cultivated and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination-without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.” Moreover, Powell stressed, the critical ingredient for success would be organization: “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.” By 1971, future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell felt compelled to assert, in a memo that was to help galvanize business circles, that the “American economic system is under broad attack.” This attack, Powell maintained, required mobilization for political combat: “Business must learn the lesson. In corporate circles, this pronounced and sustained shift was met with disbelief and then alarm. “From 1969 to 1972,” as the political scientist David Vogel summarizes in one of the best books on the political role of business, “virtually the entire American business community experienced a series of political setbacks without parallel in the postwar period.” In particular, Washington undertook a vast expansion of its regulatory power, introducing tough and extensive restrictions and requirements on business in areas from the environment to occupational safety to consumer protection. Despite electoral setbacks, the liberalism of the Great Society had surprising political momentum. As we have seen, these defeats continued unabated when Richard Nixon won the White House. Used to having broad sway, employers faced a series of surprising defeats in the 1960s and early 1970s. To be more precise, what had become very apparent to the business community was that it was getting its clock cleaned. In the last several years, that has become very apparent to us. The interrelationship of business with business is no longer so important as the interrelationship of business with government. But the thing that affects business most today is government. We have been in New York since before the turn of the century, because we regarded this city as the center of business and industry. In the fall of 1972, the venerable National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) made a surprising announcement: It planned to move its main offices from New York to Washington, D.C. Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell to a neighbor working with the U.S. Hacker and Paul Pierson explain the significance of the Powell Memorandum, a call-to-arms for American corporations written by Virginia lawyer (and future U.S. In this excerpt from Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, authors Jacob S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |