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Like Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie, Barton has become an emblematic emissary of the therapeutic ethos, reducing Christianity to “positive thinking,” the repetition of bromides to guarantee vitality, personal magnetism, and business success.
Barton portrays Jesus as a deft executive who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” Despite Barton’s echo of Ford that “all work is worship; all useful service prayer,” it was clear that work and service were conceived in managerial and professional terms. Indeed, Barton believed that corporate business was God’s indispensable partner in dominion over the planet. “Whoever works wholeheartedly at any worthy calling is a co-worker with the Almighty,”
executives was also recast as a modern School of Athens. Once derided as philistines, corporate leaders became, in the 1920s, Platonic sages and utopian visionaries. As syndicated columnist E. W. Howe wrote in Nation’s Business in 1921, the wisdom of businessmen is “the truest, fairest, and most important.” “Business men,” he reassured his readers, exhibit “better ability and philosophy, and are more useful than writers, soap box orators, politicians and statesmen.” “Commerce leads the way,” one journalist declaimed in the Forum in 1922, “and all arts, all professions, all culture follow.”
According to Charles Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New York, the benevolent and profitable industrial practices of corporate statesmen were “bringing to a nearer realization the dreams of Utopians.”
Already renowned as the sage of “progressive obsolescence”—the ancestor of “planned obsolescence”—Frederick
Calkins was equally ambiguous, if also more florid. As the epigraph for Business the Civilizer (1928)—a mostly light-hearted potpourri of anecdotes, business advice, advertising tips, and prognostication—Calkins chose Emerson’s wry dictum from Works and Days: “The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering trade.”
In that spirit, Calkins wrote that beauty is a “new business tool,” implying that visual or sensuous delight was yet another mercenary ruse, a cold calculation of the marginal utility to capital provided by radiance.
If corporate enterprise was the modern surrogate for knightly heroism and saintly devotion, corporate society was also the heir to the aspirations of religious tradition.
Like Walter Lippmann, Filene and Calkins agreed that the “business millennium” marked an unprecedented form of religious life. “The right and power to buy must lead to a great new religious awakening,” Filene proclaimed, “a religious experience such as humanity has never had an opportunity to know before.”
Filene rejoiced that, free from dogmas and irrational restrictions, the religious culture of a mass-production society would be “a seven-day religion” of “constant, creative participation in human life.”
Like Ford, Calkins was impatient with the earthly corruption and ineptitude of traditional religion, and he ended Business the Civilizer with a daring assertion of corporate moral and sacral ambition.
“That eternal job of administering this planet must be turned over to the business man. The work that religion and government have failed in must be done by business.”
insouciance
Edward Sandford Martin—a founder of Harvard Lampoon and the original Life,
In the February 1925 issue of Harper’s, Martin asked “Shall Business Run the World?” and answered in an utterly ingenuous affirmative. “The world is becoming spiritualized,” he marveled, and business was the spirit’s leading sacramental vessel.
Arks of the soul of America, these “ecclesiastical corporations” were “material combinations for spirit to work through,” providing a “link be...
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Indeed, they had “touched the hem of Christ’s garment and felt the virtue ...
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“If Business is to manage the world,” Martin asserted, “it must be Big Business: very big, indeed—comprehending all things.”
The expansive enchantment of corporations augured the grand finale of human history.
A lawyer and professor at Yale Law School before he took over the Justice Department’s antitrust division in 1938, Arnold penned two books—The Symbols of Government (1935) and The Folklore of Capitalism (1937)—that contained a sardonic analysis of the American business creed.
Arnold was an anthropologist of capitalist enchantment and a herald of a new iconography. “The true faith is Capitalism,” he stated in Folklore, and “its priests are lawyers and economists.”
Arnold asserted, “there is no evidence that the human race is going to … get along without a priesthood, whether it be religious, civil, or economic.”
Sharing with Lippmann and H. L. Mencken a wan contempt for democracy, Arnold underscored his lack of faith in popular rationality by suggesting that “from a humanitarian point of view,” the best form of government was “that which we find in an insane asylum.” Doctors do not instruct or argue with the inmates about their delusions; rather they make them “as comfortable as possible, regardless of their respective moral deserts.”5 The lesson for the “new class” was clear: since the masses can’t handle too much reality, keep them spellbound with empty incantations.
With his bemused contempt for common people, Arnold represents, in this view, a new, more technocratic form of liberalism
“He is the same who fixed the stars in place,” the voice continued, “Who set afire the sun … who puts some molecules together in a way to make a man.”
After listening for hours to this rotomontade in his home on Riverside Drive, Theodor Adorno concluded that radio was a technology of modern enchantment. Noting that many a radio set even looked like “a tabernacle,” Adorno detected a psychic affinity between the corporate “radio voice” and God that underscored the authoritarian nature and design of the corporate media.
Reconciling corporate civilization with the most mysterious forces of the universe, the Magic Kingdom was a heavenly city of Fordist enchantment.
Disney himself was certainly no populist—he was, after all, the head of a corporate studio whose animators’ union he broke in 1941—and as a rambling 1935 memo to animators indicated, Disney’s modernism was more than “sentimental.”
In short films such as Santa’s Workshop (1932) and Mickey’s Amateurs (1937)—and arguably later in Pinocchio—Disney sought to reconcile audiences to the technology of mass production. Sensing the blend of fascination and distrust in popular attitudes toward industrial technology, Disney endowed machines with souls. In Disney animations, “the machine becomes human,” Seldes surmised, “just when humanity is afraid mankind will be turned into a machine.”
He conceded the obvious escapism in Disney films; if Disney sang “a marvelous lullaby,” who among Americans, “whose lives are graphed by the cent and dollar,” wouldn’t want to forget being “shackled by hours of work … by a mathematical precision of time”? Precisely because it afforded release, escapism was a form, however temporary, of emancipation from Fordist drudgery. Liberating audiences for a few enchanting hours from “the timeclock mechanism of American life,”
In the first of these segments (based on Goethe’s poem), Mickey Mouse plays the ornery apprentice to a sorcerer, learning the arts of magic that preceded modern science and technology.
When his master retires to bed one evening, Mickey—tired of performing household chores—opens his master’s book of spells and gets a broom to do his drudgery.
When Mickey loses control of the spell and almost floods the house, only the sorcerer’s swift response prevents catastrophe. The obvious lesson—don’t fool around with things you don’t understand—had a political import: the marvels of ...
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Disney’s enchantment went deeper than pixie dust, demons, and dancing mushrooms.
As Eisenstein saw, Disney merged the longing for enchantment with submission to the power of modern technology.
The animated replication of enchantment would pacify, but not fulfill, that desire; it would even encourage a flight from reality into the worlds of computer generation, fostering an indifference to material reality tha...
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The shift to “human relations” marked the work of Mary Parker Follett, a Boston activist and political theorist who was one of the foremost writers and speakers on management in the 1920s. Follett’s prewar work in vocational guidance piqued an interest in industrial relations, and she quickly joined the ranks of Boston’s business elite.
“Our daily living may itself become an art,” she prophesied in Creative Experience (1924).
“In commerce we may find culture, in industry idealism, in our business system beauty, in mechanics morals.” Providing more than commodities, profits, and paychecks, the corporation offered “our greatest spiritual nourishment,” she wrote, a “sacrament of life.”
Corporate managers and executives were the clerisy of this moral and sacramental economy. “The real service of business” to the community, she asserted in a typical 1925 talk, was ...
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Follett lauded the loyalty of the corporate leader to “the soul of his work,” a dedication that was “the highest romance as it is the deepest religion.” Indeed, the “high adventure of business,” Follett waxed, was its release of “the deeper thing within every man, transcending every man, which you may call your ideal, or God, or what you will.” “No occupation,” she concluded, “can make a more worthy appeal to the imagination.”
“the real service of business,” whose innumerable productive activities constituted “those manifold, interweaving activities of men by which spiritual values are created.”
Speaking in the spring of 1927 to a conference of personnel administrators—“pioneers,” she flattered her audience, “working out something new in human relationships”—she observed that “business men are quietly … working out a system of organization which is not democratic in our old understanding of the word, but something better than that.” This new corporate system was based “neither on equality nor on arbitrary authority, but on functional unity.”
The Hawthorne employees considered Western Electric “an almost mythical entity” whose perceived combination of power, solicitude, and indifference produced “a sense of human defeat.”
“the desire for continuous and intimate association in work with others remains a strong, possibly the strongest, human capacity.”
Indeed, despite their technocratic demeanor, Mayo and Roethlisberger perceived the religious longi...
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It was no mere figure of speech when, shortly after World War II, Mayo told a Harvard Business School audience that management theory could effect in workers “the strong and simple religious feeling of medieval times.”
Almost a decade later, the ex-Trotskyite Burnham offered similar claims and solutions in The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians (1943), contending that a government of experts should be supplemented by at least a facade of democracy.
In portentously titled books, such as The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942), Drucker entered this debate by challenging corporate managers to save Western civilization from what the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset had dubbed the “revolt of the masses.”
“There has never been a more efficient, a more honest, a more capable and conscientious group of rulers than the professional management of the great American corporations today.”
