Kim McQuaid

Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community, 1920-1940

Contrasting with the resentment of other power structures, especially corporate business, that democratic governments display is the obvious need of the powerful and the productive for each other in times of stress. Professor McQuaid follows the activities of a group of “corporate liberals” (i.e., big business leaders who believed that intelligent collaboration between business, government, and organized labor was an attainable goal) from World War I through the prosperous 1920s, the despondent 1930s, and the busy and prosperous years of World War II. He concludes that corporate liberal opinion grew more influential in both corporate and governmental circles during and after the period.

Businessman and Bureaucrat: The Evolution of the American Social Welfare System, 1900–1940

Between 1900 and 1940, organized industry and the federal government, acting in conjunction with the states, created an American social welfare system. The two major participants in this process evolved along similar lines during this period. Both began as simple organizations and developed into complex, functional bureaucracies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the federal government did not exist as a social welfare entity. Private corporations, the first to face the administrative and economic problems posed by the development of national markets, created social welfare systems for their employees long before the New Deal. Until the depression, these efforts enjoyed clear supremacy. By the end of the 1930s, however, a distinctly “public†social welfare bureaucracy and program had been developed on the federal level. Corporations and the state underwent similar changes but at different times, and the difference in timing influenced their relations. This essay describes the growth of these public and private bureaucracies and identifies their similarities and differences during the early twentieth century.

Welfare Reform in the 1950s

Contrary to the impression left by historians, neither welfare expansion nor welfare reform died in the 1950s. Even conservatives believed in the necessity of federal spending for welfare. Disagreements came over the proper ways to spend federal money. The Eisenhower administration propagated a rehabilitation approach in an attempt to use federal money to end individual, state, and local dependence on the federal government. The administrations 1954 social security and vocational rehabilitation laws reflected this approach. Bureaucrats in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, working with a Democratic Congress, managed to extend the 1954 laws into a major expansion of federal power, as the passage of disability insurance in 1956 demonstrated. Institutional continuity, not heroic individual effort, provided the dynamic for welfare reform in the 1950s.

Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest (review)

as a fellow Jew. Yet it was among Columbia’s liberal Jewish intellectuals that this son of an immigrant intermarriage between an Eastern European Jewish furrier and a German Lutheran mother found a home. Hofstadter was invited into what Daniel Bell called “the West Side Kibbutz,” a group that included Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Lionel Trilling, Fritz Stern, Peter Gay, and Walter Metzger. Hofstadter’s debt to Morningside Heights was molded by these friends and colleagues. A sharp critic of capitalism and deeply suspicious of rightwing anti-Communists, Hofstadter also mistrusted “the people” as too easily manipulated. The university became his refuge, where he believed the free exchange of ideas remained crucial to democracy. Beleaguered and confused by the student rebellions of the 1960s, he reserved his sharpest criticism for white students, whose self-indulgent bating of the police he felt threatened academic freedom. What is missing from Brown’s treatment of this period and from much of the biography, however, is an analysis of Hofstadter’s views on race. Brown notes his sympathy for black sharecroppers in his master’s thesis, his support for the civil rights movement, and his willingness to defend the rights of certain prominent individuals—Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver, for example—who were threatened by the security state. But he barely mentions that Columbia students protested not only the Vietnam War, but the university’s plan for a new gymnasium in an African-American neighborhood, displacing black residents and denying them access to the new facility. These students believed the university to be a microcosm of U.S. inequalities. Nor does Brown discuss the debate over racial preferences in the mid-1960s between black intellectuals and liberal, primarily Jewish academics. Here Brown’s methodology, which utilizes Hofstadter’s published writings to frame his narrative, does not serve him well. In 1964, Columbia graduate Norman Podhoretz, freshly installed editor of Commentary Magazine, launched a roundtable on “Liberalism and the Negro” which, in retrospect, laid bare pluralism’s inadequacies, especially with regard to how race worked to block social mobility for African Americans. Several members of the “Upper West Side Kibbutz” eventually joined in a heated conversation with black intellectuals, including James Baldwin and City University psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, which continued into the 1970s. Jewish social scientists including Nathan Glazer, Bell, Lipset, and others brandished immigrant Jewish success as proof of pluralism and opportunity in U.S. society, even for oppressed minorities. They considered African Americans as any other ethnic group, eventually faulting, not the larger society, but the inadequacies of black community institutions. There are hints in Brown’s analysis of Hofstadter’s last published work, America at 1750, that he took his cues on the emerging racial crisis from his pluralist colleagues in the Upper West Side Kibbutz, but what else did he think about these divisive issues? Despite these omissions, Brown has captured Hofstadter’s intellectual complexity, his brilliance as a writer, thinker, mentor, colleague, and friend, with considerable skill and sensitivity. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Regina Morantz-Sanchez