The Secret Genesis of Corporations’ Political Dominance
Our penultimate episode
Good morning, subscriber!
Have you ever wondered how elected officials became so beholden to money? Well, in our penultimate episode this season, we explore the Powell Memo, a confidential document from 1971 that inspired corporations to take over US politics:
You can also listen to the episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts (thanks to the peeps who’ve left reviews!), and watch it on Instagram here.
Today’s story comes from We, the Corporations by Adam Winkler, and Dark Money by Jane Mayer.
Next time, on the Season 3 finale of Skipped History...
We’ll examine the family foundation largely responsible for undermining election integrity today. I actually wrote about the foundation last week for paying subscribers, which inspired me to make our finale on the same subject. (Not to worry, premium pals, there’s plenty of new content in the video!)
And next week, I’ll write to paying subscribers about why abortion became a public issue in 1962, when one woman’s experience transformed national discourse and ultimately led to Roe v. Wade. The post should contextualize the Supreme Court’s ongoing proceedings concerning Texas’ new, draconian, and destructive abortion law.
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Otherwise, see you in two weeks with the season finale! Today’s transcript is below.
Cheers,
Ben
This week’s transcript
Hello, I’m Ben Tumin, and welcome to Skipped History. Today’s story is about the Powell Memo. I read about it in We, The Corporations by Adam Winkler, and Dark Money by Jane Mayer.
Born and raised in Virginia, attorney Lewis Powell was known for his “quality of temperament.” He never swore and was regarded as a southern “gentleman” who resembled “a kindly country pharmacist.” But as I discovered when asking my pharmacist why it takes 45 minutes to transfer pills from the big bottle to the little bottle, even the kindest people have their sore spots. And that was also true of Powell, particularly when it came to crime, or what he viewed as society’s “excessive tolerance” of “substandard… and unlawful conduct” in minority communities. Powell also had a sore spot when it came to “antagonists of American business,” aka liberals who believed in regulating corporate behavior. And in 1971, apparently unsatisfied by just complaining about these things to his neighbors like a normal person, Powell outlined his views in a “memorandum.” The Powell Memo, as it became known, continues to shape the Right-wing playbook to this day.
To understand the Powell Memo, let’s first discuss anti-corporate crusader Ralph Nader. In 1965, after attending Harvard Law School, Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a book about the “designed-in dangers” of US cars and how US automakers resisted adding costly safety features like seatbelts or tension-defusing car horns. In response, General Motors hired a private detective agency to “discredit Mr. Nader and shut him up.” Unfortunately for GM, the press uncovered the scheme, and the ensuing scandal transformed Nader into a household name overnight. By 1971, he’d used his newfound fame to start Public Citizen, an organization dedicated to curbing corporate power. Thanks in large part to the group’s advocacy efforts, the early 70s saw Congress pass legislation like the Water Pollution Control Act, the Consumer Product Safety Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, all of which restricted corporate activity.
Now, while consumers and the planet benefitted from this new legislation, Powell, an eminent corporate attorney who sat on the boards of not one or two but a dozen of the largest companies in the country, came to view Nader as “the single most effective antagonist of American business.” As 1971 wore on, he collected newspaper and magazine articles documenting the threat of student radicals, Black power militants, and the growing opposition to concentrated wealth (God forbid). And per the suggestion of his friend Eugene Sydnor, Chairman of the Education Committee of the Chamber of Commerce, in August 1971, Powell typed up his thoughts into a 33-page memo titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”
“No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” he began.” The “extremists of the Left” were “waging ideological warfare against the enterprise system,” and it was time to conduct “guerilla warfare” in response. Liberal professors teaching students to “despise the American political and economic system” must be challenged; “textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance”; the “national television networks should be monitored” and “equal time should be demanded” for pro-business views; and “a flow of scholarly articles” on the benefits of capitalism should be produced and distributed widely to shape the public’s attitudes. In sum, Powell asserted, “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years,” a statement you might expect to hear more from a general rallying their troops than a kindly country pharmacist, but that’s only if you’ve never attended the Pharmacist Association’s annual strategic planning meeting where they plot how to increase sales of antibiotics. This. Is. Sparfloxacin! A fluoroquinolone antibiotic, prescribed for community-acquired pneumonia, and chronic bronchitis.
When first written, Powell’s memo was “confidential,” and he only intended for it to be read by the leaders of the Chamber of Commerce and a small group of friends. However, in September 1972, Jack Anderson, a reporter at the Washington Post, received a leaked copy and published a story hoping to build opposition to the “militant political action program” the memo proposed. His article had the opposite effect. Within a year, a Chamber of Commerce task force announced that “millions of Americans… have read it” and “hundreds of thousands of copies have been circulated.” The Chamber endorsed Powell’s call to heighten corporations’ political activity, as did conservative business tycoons like Joseph Coors and John Olin, and major corporations like General Electric, Dow Chemical, and Kraft. Consequently, the number of corporations that hired “government affairs” lobbyists surged by over 500% from 1968 to 1978, and the lobbying industry as we know it today was born.
And the ramifications of the Powell Memo hardly stop there. Many now-influential think tanks devoted to promoting free-market principles also formed in response to Powell’s call to arms. The Heritage Foundation formed in 1973, the Koch-funded Cato Institute formed in 1974, and although founded earlier, the American Enterprise Institute grew from a staff of 19 and a budget of under $900,000 in 1970 to a staff of 135 and a budget of over $10 million in 1980. Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce went from an organization with “no muscle either in the executive branch or on Capitol Hill” to “one of the best grassroots lobbying organizations in America.” Soon, the chamber called on its hundreds of thousands of business firm members to generate calls, letters, and editorials hostile to healthcare reform, campaign finance reform, consumer protection laws, and environmental regulations. Not by coincidence, as Adam Winkler writes, “The Reagan Revolution of 1980, which was built around the vision articulated in the Powell Memo, ushered in a conservative era committed to free markets, small government, pro-business tax policies, and deregulation of industry.”
As for Powell, he continued working as an attorney—for two months. Remember his not-so-kindly views on crime in minority communities? Well, they came to the attention of Richard Nixon, who nominated Powell to the Supreme Court in October 1971. Of course, the memo was still a secret then, which is significant because it included a claim by Powell that the Supreme Court and “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” Alas, the Senate never got the memo (had to say that once) and confirmed Powell by a vote of 89-1. Over the following 25 years, Powell ruled consistently in favor of corporations, including delivering the majority opinion in a 1978 case where he defined the free speech right of corporations for the first time; a decision that would later be cited \in cases like Citizens United. Put another way, Powell’s “careful long-range planning” paid off... almost as well as my local pharmacist’s, who somehow convinced me to take Sparfloxacin even though I feel fine.
In sum, discovered a year after his confirmation, Powell’s memo became an integral strategic planning document for the GOP and ultimately helped cement the influence of corporations over US politics. The subsequent Powell Era would usher in not only a wave of deregulation but also set the stage for attacks on election integrity today.
Tintl matbosh.
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