1. For example, almost no capitalists of any sort can be found in the 508 pages on Progressive Era intellectual life provided by Daniel T. Rogers in his award-winning Atlantic Crossings (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). Even the transatlantic Andrew Carnegie, whose many essays on philanthropy and economic reform make him an obvious candidate for inclusion, appears only briefly as a provider of seed money for other intellectual reformers. Similarly, among the thirteen essays that comprise American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia, 2006), not a single writer gives a central role to a pre-1950 business executive or capitalist; only the essay by Kimberley Phillips-Fein, “American Counterrevolutionary: Lemuel Ricketts Boulware and General Electric, 1950–1960,” gives a central role to a businessman. However, new histories of capitalism are suddenly abounding and among that literature some works focus on the role businessmen played in the political economy issues of the late nineteenth century and first third of the twentieth century. Particularly useful are Levy, Jonathan, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which provides an original and incisive account of risk and risk management in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, and Ott, Julia, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. This literature is very much worth reading. In the immediate post-1960s era, historians often of a leftist persuasion wrestled with the enduring power of capitalist elites and concluded that many key capitalists, at least during the 1920–40 era, were not obdurate obstructionists of all reform measures but were instead capitalist reformers. Kim McQuaid wrote several important articles along these lines, including the seminal piece, “Corporate Liberalism and the American Business Community, 1920–1940,” Business History Review 52, no. 3 (1978): 342–68. This article by McQuaid appeared in an issue of BHR focused on corporate liberalism, which was brilliantly introduced by Hawley, Ellis, “The Discovery and Study of a ‘Corporate Liberalism,’” Business History Review 52, no. 3 (1978): 309–20; see also the foundational text byCrossRefGoogle ScholarBrandes, Stuart D., American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago, 1976).Google Scholar

3. The role of these business conservatives before the 1950s is still underdeveloped. For important exceptions, see Burk, Robert, The Corporate State and the Broker State (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; David Farber’s discussion of corporate conservatives in Sloan Rules (Chicago, 2001); and Phillips-Fein, Kim, Invisible Hands (New York, 2009), 3–47.Google Scholar Phillips-Fein’s work is focused on the post–World War II years, but she offers an excellent sketch of 1930s-era businessmen’s opposition to the New Deal. Her portrait of the anti–New Deal organization, the American Liberty League, is, however, off in a few minor details. For a more detailed look at the Liberty League and the role Raskob and the du Ponts played in it, see Farber, David, Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Live and Times of John Jakob Raskob, Capitalist (New York, 2013), chap. 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Crowther, Samuel, “Everybody Ought to be Rich: An Interview with John J. Raskob,” Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1929, 8, 36.Google Scholar

5. Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 5.

6. For a broad history of the role of the mass-purchasing-power argument in twentieth-century America, see Jacobs, Meg, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005).Google Scholar

7. Gretchen Dau Cunningham to John Raskob [JJR], 21 October 1935, file 529, John Raskob Papers [JRP], Hagley Library, Wilmington, Delaware [hereafter JRP].

8. A subtle and cogent view of the capitalists’ privileged but not necessarily dominant position in recent American history is nicely outlined in Hacker, Jacob S. and Pierson, Paul, “Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State,” Politics and Society 30, no. 2 (June 2002): 277–325.CrossRefGoogle ScholarHacker and Pierson argue for the contingent but structurally powerful role of capitalist power in social welfare debates particularly during and then after the New Deal era, but their broad literature review is pertinent to my claim. In this essay I do not ponder, as they do, the role that the state and a given policy regime plays in limiting capitalist power in the United State, though I do see that frame as critical in the explorations I am pursuing of the role John Raskob and his allies at DuPont and GM played in the politics of the United States between 1908 and 1937.

9. White, Theodore H., “The Action Intellectuals,” Life, 7 June 1967, 43–76.Google Scholar

10. Schmeller, Mark, “The Political Economy of Opinion: Public Credit and Concepts of Public Opinion in the Age of Federalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 29, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Crowther, Samuel, “John J. Raskob, and the World’s Largest Business,” The World’s Work 40, no. 6 (October 1920): 612.Google Scholar

12. Temple, Alan, “The Finance Chief of General Motors,” Commerce and Finance 16 (5 January 1927): 11.Google Scholar

13. John Raskob, admittedly, did not think of himself as an intellectual. In 1928, after he resigned as chief financial officer of the General Motors Corporation to run Al Smith’s presidential campaign and to chair the Democratic National Committee, when asked to identify himself, he said he was a capitalist. A capitalist intellectual, to academic historians, may seem a bit of an oxymoron. In “What Is Our ‘Canon’? How American Intellectual Historians Debate the Core of Their Field,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 1 (2012), David Hollinger, argues that an intellectual is a person “who ‘made history’ by arguing.” By that criterion, Raskob is a good fit. But Hollinger goes on to suggest that American intellectuals, or at least the kind of intellectuals he includes in the intellectual history canon, “have done their thinking and writing within a transnational frame, drawing upon an inventory of ideas common to philosophers, political theorists, writers, social critics, scientists, theologians, and other intellectuals in the Europe-centered West.” Here, Raskob is a less easy fit. Still, John Raskob worked hard to translate his recondite and complex ideas, drawn from many sources, into usable forms not just for his own community of inquiry but also for the larger public. As stated in the text of this article, I think Theodore White’s mid-1960s coinage “action-intellectual” best describes Raskob’s social function.

14. The story of the DuPont Company and Pierre du Pont’s leadership role at the company in the first third of the twentieth century is still best told by Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and Salsbury, Stephen, Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

15. Two quite different books explore these topics broadly; on the rise of investment trusts and other means by which middle-income Americans were introduced to stock market investing, see Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street; and for the rise of buying on the installment plan, see Calder, Lendol, Financing the American Dream (Princeton, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Neither author explores John Raskob’s pivotal role in rethinking the role of mass credit in American society or the linkages that he saw between mass-market credit and investment plans and the resolution of American social and class strife. Also useful is the valuable overview of the early years of the auto installment-buying business and GMAC’s role in it by Hyman, Louis, Debtor Nation (Princeton, 2011), 20–27Google Scholar; Hyman does, though, give a somewhat misleading narrative of events as he underplays GMAC’s and Raskob’s commitment to consumer credit in the early years of its existence. Perhaps because the first New York Times article on GMAC erroneously stated that GMAC would only provide credit to dealers and not to consumers, Hyman writes that it would be several years before GMAC focused on consumer loans; GMAC’s publically available reports on its actual loan practices demonstrates that from the beginning a majority of loans by both number and dollar amount went to consumers and not dealers; for that first misleading article: “Guaranty Securities Co.,” New York Times, 26 February 1918, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FB0810FA3A5B11738DDDAF0A94DA405B888DF1D3; and for the actual GMAC figures, see “General Motors Acceptance Corp.,” Wall Street Journal, 9 August 1922, 6.

16. John J. Raskob (JJR) to Andrew Carnegie, 31 December 1908, file 345, JRP.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Andrew Carnegie to JJR, 4 January 1909, file 345, JRP.

20. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street. Ott’s work deeply informs this section.

21. JJR to C. S. Mott, 11 November 1919, file 1599, JRP.

22. “Who’s Who at President’s Conference,” New York Times, 5 October 1919, sec. 4, p. 8.

23. Raskob’s life gave further evidence of his empathy for workingmen. Many of his boyhood friends were from working-class Catholic families and Raskob remained close to many of those men throughout his life; he was quite familiar with their economic insecurity—he lent many of them money, gave job advice, and in several cases provided money for their sons’ educations. Raskob never lived completely within a capitalist class bubble. For these biographical details, see Farber, Everybody Ought to be Rich.

24. Ibid.

25. “U.S. Troops Raid Gary Strikers’ Homes, Seize Arms, Industrial Parley Organizes,” New York Tribune, 8 October 1919, 3.

26. Chest Wright, “Employers Win Delay on Collective Bargaining,” New York Tribune, 18 October 1919, 2.

27. See JJR to C. S. Mott, 4 June 1920, file 1599, JRP, for Raskob’s enthusiasm for Cartwright’s little book. On several other occasions, Raskob bought multiple copies of books on political economy issues and sent them off to his wide circle of business colleagues. As far as I can tell, he was not the recipient of such books from these same colleagues, but I did not read every letter Raskob received—there are tens of thousands in the Raskob papers. The degree to which at least some big businessmen and capitalists in the early decades of the twentieth century sent, received, and discussed books and articles as a means of creating a sort of class consciousness is a fascinating issue and begs for further research. The specific role the Chamber of Commerce played in that process would be a key aspect of that research.

28. Raskob, John J., “How Big Should a Business Grow?” System, October 1920, 750.Google Scholar

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. “A New Captain of Industry: A Rising Luminary of Industry and His Vast Orbit,” Current Opinion 69, no. 5 (November 1920): 627.

32. Ibid., 628.

33. The American history survey version of the early auto industry seems always to make Henry Ford the sole provider of the industrialized version of the American dream for providing well-made cars at very low prices produced by decently paid workers. True enough, but GM’s decision to fully embrace installment buying did more to spread car ownership than did Ford’s model. Fordism is vitally important, but GM, arguably, played a much bigger role in shaping America’s consumer capitalist society not just through installment buying but also by embracing new worker relations, new management and organizational methods, and a new model of consumer-oriented marketing, sales, and production. For this argument, see David Farber, Sloan Rules.

34. “We Are Thirty Years Old,” News and Views, February 1949, 83–12.162, GMAC, Scharchburg Archive (SA), Kettering University, Flint, Michigan. The Raskob papers at the Hagley Library are massive and provide extraordinary insight into his financial life and provide excellent insight into his work at the DuPont Company. The papers are far less revealing of his work at General Motors. For example, while the archive contains thousands of letters Raskob exchanged with his many friends, the angry letters he exchanged with General Motors leader Billy Durant during the crisis years of 1919 and 1920 are usually missing; many of them are available through the Durant Papers at the Scharchburg Archive in Flint. Similarly, the Raskob papers include very little on his work setting up and managing GMAC. One explanation for the relative dearth of materials is that Raskob might have culled much of his GM correspondence to prevent the federal government from finding this material; the Roosevelt and Truman administrations launched several major investigations of the relationship between DuPont and GM. As a result of the paucity of primary sources in Raskob’s papers, I have had to rely on retrospective materials published in GMAC’s charming but probably not terribly self-critical house organ, News and Views. As anyone who has done research on corporate America knows, one must often be creative in getting at the story of litigation-resistant and politically-sensitive business corporations.

35. Ibid., 165.

36. I am still closely following Calder’s history, 184–89.

37. Calder, Financing the American Dream, 189. This section on Ford is drawn from Calder, 189–91.

38. Baldwin, Neil, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York, 2001).Google Scholar

39. Quoted in Louis Hyman, Borrow: The American Way of Debt (New York, 2012), 44.

40. Hyman, Debtor Nation, 32.

41. Guaranty, a public corporation by this time, did report on its defaults and in all of 1917, at least, it was spectacularly low. They company claimed it had made more than fifty thousand loans and had been forced to repossess only forty-five cars; “Guaranty Securities Co.,” New York Times, 26 February 1918.

42. Clarke, Sally H., Trust and Power (New York, 2007), 218–21.Google Scholar

43. “To Finance Auto Dealers,” New York Times, 26 January 1919, sec. 2, p. 5.

44. T. H. Keating, “Grandfather Said It Was Wrong,” News and Views, February 1949, 11, GMAC, 83.12.162, SA. The entire issue of this GMAC publication is dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of GMAC.

45. Income Status of Buyers of Autos on Deferred Plan,” Washington Post, 29 April 1920, 6.

46. Ibid.

47. “Tells of Financing $300,000,000 in Cars,” New York Times, 1 May 1922, 25.

48. Quoted in Hyman, Debtor Nation, 43.

49. For a laudatory account, see “Business: Installment Buying,” Time, 28 November 1927, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,751736,00.html.

50. “The Best of Whatever We Are,” New and Views, October 1949, 17, GMAC 83.12.162, SA.

51. The quoted passage is from Alfred P. Sloan, “Congratulations to GMAC,” Raskob’s unrecorded speech as well as GMAC’s early days is discussed in the article “Looking Over the Long Pull,” News and Views, February 1949, 8–10.

52. Hyman, Debtor Nation, 28.

53. For the best overview of investment trusts and the more general effort to make Americans a nation of shareholders, see Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street; for investment trusts, in particular, see chap. 8.

54. “Raskob Will Help Workers to Invest,” New York Times, 7 May 1929, 1, 8.

55. All quotes in this section are made in “Mr. Raskob’s ‘Poor Man’s Investment Trust,’” The Literary Digest 101, no. 9 (1 June 1929): 88–91.

56. “Raskob Sounds Caution on Security Prices,” Wall Street Journal, 5 October 1928, 5.

57. Crowther, Samuel, “Everybody Ought to be Rich: An Interview with John J. Raskob,” Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1929, 8, 36.Google Scholar

58. See Farber, Sloan Rules.

59. While GMAC did not survive General Motors’ financial collapse in the early twenty-first century, right through 2008 it played a highly profitable and fundamental role in the corporation’s bottom line, providing credit to more than 75 percent of GM’s dealers and to millions of individual auto buyers. GMAC was a model for other mass consumer credit enterprises; Eric Dash and Vikas Bajaj, “Fed Approves GMAC Request to Become a Bank,” New York Times, 24 December 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/25gmac.html?em.