"Industry on Parade": The Business Community and Vocational Education, 1940–1990

• In Event: Vocationalism in U.S. Education: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Abstract

In their edited collection Corporations and American Democracy, historians Naomi Lamoreaux and William Novak capture a major theme of corporate history: “Americans’ long-standing love/hate relationship with the corporation--their enthusiastic embrace of the corporation as an engine of opportunity and prosperity, and their simultaneous skeptical distrust of it as a source of corruption and driver of inequality” (2017, p. 2). Over time Americans have vacillated between these poles of support and suspicion. The post-depression years of the New Deal took corporate reputations to new lows as Americans contemplated and endorsed serious alterations to their economic system. The business community, however, had a plan to respond.

According to historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, beginning in the 1940s and running into the 1980s corporations and business associations worked “to restore their influence over education as part of their broader campaign to create an economic and political climate favorable to business” (1994, p. 189). In shaping workers’ education, business leaders hoped to develop a more amenable generation of American voters and employees. But what were the actual mid-century educational policies and programs of corporations and business associations? This paper examines the business communities’ staunch and long-lasting support for vocational education initiatives through archival research spanning the 1940s to the 1980s.

As business associations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers had long been involved in education matters through donations, lobbying, curriculum development, and teacher training. Companies like Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, and General Mills similarly created a wide variety of educational materials (everything from promotional pamphlets to entrepreneurship programs), advocated particular educational policies, and financed programs for economic education. Business executives like Frank Abrams and Pierre S. du Pont served on boards of directors and facilitated communications with non-profits like the Ford Foundation in order to funnel money to priority educational initiatives. This paper looks at all of these groups to assemble the aggregate--if sometimes divergent--approach of American business to vocational education.

Kim Phillips-Fein portrays the most conservative individuals in the business community as working “for more than forty years to undo the system of labor unions, federal social welfare programs, and government regulation of the economy that came into existence during and after the Great Depression” (2009, p. xi-xii). Although this does not capture the entire business community, certain issues united nearly everyone, especially vocational education. But surprisingly, vocational education was one of the only areas in which business endorsed and even encouraged greater federal government support. So why did an otherwise hostile coalition back federal (as well as state and local) government support for vocational education? Using archival material, newspapers, executive statements, and internal communications and financial data this paper reveals how the business community worked behind the scenes and in public to ensure that specific job training programs would orient workers to a pro-business, free market worldview. Rather than lament from the sidelines, business actively shaped policy discussion and program design in ways that would presage business’ role in later education reform initiatives.

Author

• William Angus McLeod, University of Pennsylvania