

Daniel Robert
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 an existential crisis. 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...
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 an existential crisis. 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 part, this campaign encouraged managers to compel their clerks to exude "courtesy," "sunshine," and "patience" toward customers. Rather than bribe the few, executives would convert the many using a combination of emotional labor and improved customer service. At the same time, executives organized the widespread manipulation of the press, schools, radio, and movies.
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.
Courteous Capitalism portrays the great lengths that the monopolistic utilities of the early twentieth century went to in hopes of cultivating a sense of personal affinity among a public they savvily recognized to be both consumers and citizens.
Courteous Capitalism portrays the great lengths that the monopolistic utilities of the early twentieth century went to in hopes of cultivating a sense of personal affinity among a public they savvily recognized to be both consumers and citizens.
Courteous Capitalism tells us how corporate monopolies in the early twentieth century strove to augment their political power by controlling the behavior of their employees.
Robert argues that nineteenth-century anti-monopolists thrived because of the 'public be damned' customer service of big business. Under political assault, executives forced employees to have the attitude 'the customer is always right' as a public relations strategy to make America safe for monopoly.
A compelling account of how executives and financiers used assorted economic, political, and social methods to pacify customers and to maintain their control of utilities systems.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Courteous Capitalism Begins
2. Courteous Capitalism Intensifies
3. The Architecture of Consent
4. Customer Stock Ownership as Corporate Political Strategy
5. Making the News
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Courteous Capitalism Begins
2. Courteous Capitalism Intensifies
3. The Architecture of Consent
4. Customer Stock Ownership as Corporate Political Strategy
5. Making the News
6. Subverting Civic
Conclusion
Notes
Index
with Hopkins Press Books