Courteous Capitalism

A provocative history of how corporate titans in the 1920s used a massive public relations campaign to transform public opinion on big business.

In the early twentieth century, as Americans erupted in righteous indignation over the flagrant abuses of big business, utility executives faced a crisis of existential proportions. With calls for strict regulation or outright government ownership of utilities, how could streetcar, electricity, and telephone executives thwart municipal ownership, rein in regulation, and secure huge profits?

In Courteous Capitalism, Daniel Robert reveals how utility executives answered this question by launching the largest nongovernmental public relations campaign the nation had ever seen. In one aspect of the campaign, managers compelled their clerks to exude "courtesy," "sunshine," and "patience" toward customers. Rather than bribe the few, executives would convert the many using this emotional labor and improved customer service. At the same time, executives organized the widespread manipulation of the press, schools, and movies. By planting articles in newspapers, inundating schools with supposedly educational books, remodeling customer service offices, peddling stock to customers, developing radio shows, and anonymously producing popular movies, utility executives succeeded in limiting public criticism and curtailing unwanted reform.

Rather than a top-down business history that focuses on politicians and company presidents or a bottom-up social history that ignores management, this book links emotional labor at the lowest level of corporations to political regulation at the highest levels of government. At once a labor history of clerks and a social history of consumers, Courteous Capitalism offers an intriguing new argument for why a major reform goal of Progressives faded and why Americans changed their minds regarding corporate monopolies.