I finished reading the novella, enjoyed the Part 1 podcast, and look forward to listening to Parts 2 and 3.
I have two observations about Part 1:
- The first clue that the story isn't in the US is 'The west wall was entirely of glass and showed the Atlantic Ocean.' Interestingly, there is a place in the mainland western hemisphere where a western window would look out onto the Atlantic Ocean. Any guesses? (see below)
- Was Lowell Lewis a callout to Lewis Powell?
Lewis Powell was a corporate lawyer who was appointed by President Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court in 1971. (1)
A few months before his appointment, Powell was commissioned by the US Chamber of Commerce to produce a blueprint for conservatives and corporations to retake America from the forces of the liberal New Deal. The infamous secret Powell Memorandum, entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," (2) outlined the plan that we all became familiar with over the past 45 years. (3) The world of "Hour of Trust" seems to flow out of the memo.
This secret memo was circulated to major US corporations. In November 1973 the memo was leaked and made public. "Hour of Trust" was published in 1973, so Wolfe didn't have access to the leaked memo when he wrote it. Could he have had access to the memo before it was leaked?
Wolfe was a project engineer at Proctor and Gamble from 1956 until 1972. P&G lobbyists were involved with implementing the strategy. (3) As a project engineer, was Wolfe privy to the Powell memo? Did it inspire him to write "Hour of Trust?"
I wish I were still able to ask him.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.
2. https://dy00k1db5oznd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Lewis-Powell-Memo.pdf
3. https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/
Panama.
This is awesome. I had never heard of this memo, but it's an exciting text. It does nicely sum up the worldview that Wolfe seems to be critiquing in this story (and Forlesen). You will definitely hear us talk about this on the air the next time we get a story on this topic!
And we wish that, too. We took a long time off from recording after his passing, and while it's been good to get back into it, coming back with Forlesen was difficult. The next episode we're recording, though, will be about some of his Letters Home, and I'm looking forward to getting to know him as a young man.
The Powell memo was super important to the modern conservative movement, but I really doubt Wolfe had access to it. Still, nice connection and it really goes to show how these ideas were in the air!
IMO the two most prominent pieces that would've been on Wolfe's mind would have been John K. Galbraith's The New Industrial State (1967, 1972) and Milton Freidman's 1970 NYT essay that declared business has no social obligations to society. Freidman's doctrine would later be formalized by economists like Michael Jensen as the "shareholder theory of value."
Wolfe's story reads like the future Galbraith feared--but one that never came to pass because of the influence of people like Freidman. This may sound like I'm defending Freidman but I am most certainly not. (The Freidmanites may have ended corporate empire building, but they are responsible for popularizing the idea that firms should act like sociopaths, which has led us to the brink of ecological collapse.)
1. First thought: Wolfe's recognition that managers of business were increasingly similar to managers of war was a popular insight among scholars of the corporate form like Alfred Chandler.
2. Glenn and Brandon note a character sardonically noting the goal of business is power, not profit. From Wikipedia on Galbraith:
This was the era of corporate empire builders, who wanted nothing more than to build the largest, unwieldiest conglomerate. Did it make sense for a wig company to own a TV network and a microwave manufacturer? No, but what is more prestigious than being the CEO who oversees the largest corporate empire!
3. Glenn and Brandon also noted that none of the executives seemed to have any experience with their industries, and in fact were completely removed from the realities of production. This too is consistent with research on business transformation in the era! The sociologist Neil Fligstein analyzed the backgrounds of corporate executives. He documented how the tendency of executives in this period to have backgrounds in industry ("I'm a third generation washing machine guy") was slowly giving way to promoting executives from outside the industry.
4. What changed? Friedman and the shareholder theory of value. Instead of third generation washing machine guys, Fligstein documents the increasing tendency to promote executives with marketing and finance backgrounds (who had no connection to the industry, or even the regions, that they suddenly became kings in. Corporate founders tended to have dense social ties with local community, but finance and marketing guys were interlopers who would not hesitate to close factories and offshore production, and they were especially happy to sell off "underperforming assets"--which meant corporations giving up entire industries and subsidiaries. Hence, the Rust Belt.
As it turned out, shareholders loved downsizing. Executives were no longer like generals, happy to preside over the biggest corporate bureaucracy they could get their hands on. Instead, they tried to juice stock prices by presiding over as few workers as possible. This was the beginning of the rise of contract labor, the Uberization of work, and factory-less companies (like Nike and Vizio). Companies today employ shockingly few employees per market cap as compared to companies of Wolfe's day.
5. This was a longwinded way of my saying: I think this story is Wolfe extrapolating a Galbraith-Freidman hybrid dystopia. He extrapolates (accurately) from Galbraith about what 1994 would look like if corporate executives continued to build empires, and the countervailing powers of labor and the state continued to wither. He is also extrapolating from Freidman's championing of the sociopathic corporation, freed from all responsibility to community, employees, and indeed society. Wolfe failed to predict (and who could blame him) how the Freidman-view would so utterly dominate the Galbraith view, making corporate empire building a thing of the past (but still ushering us into a completely different utopia). In 2019, corporations haven't become the state. Rather, they have hollowed out the state such that the wealthiest global citizens have been emancipated from all obligations to the communities that generate wealth for them.
This is marvelous, thank you. You'll hear us talk about the Freidman article in the discussion episode that's up next, but neither of us looked at Galbraith. We've also already recorded our episodes on Forlesen, where Wolfe is clearly thinking about these same issues, but you can expect us to have read Galbraith by the time we do our next "Road So Far" episode.
This "Galbraith-Freidman hybird dystopia" (I'm going to start using this term) also seems to be at the heart of the cyberpunk movement, which Wolfe is prefiguring here as well. It's not so much massive corporate empires as corporate manors in which people are utterly dependent on their corporate employer which in turn has little oversight from or obligation to a government, meaning that citizens have no protection from their economic oppressors ... who are constantly telling them they should be thankful for their own oppression. It truly is a nightmare.
Great wrap up! Nice mention of Eisenhower's farewell address and the fact that it supposedly included the phrase "Military Industrial Congressional Complex" but his aides made him take it out because it would be too provocative.
The exploding and combusting people I also took to be a spiritual/mystical event caused by the outrageous circumstances of their lives. Sort of like their saying "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
With that cultural reference here are some movies that pair rather well with The Hour of Trust:
- Rollerball (1975, directed by Norman Jewison) This film is NOT about a violent game. It is about how the forces of globalization/corporatization use misdirection to keep the masses placated with bread and circuses.
- Network (1976, directed by Sidney Lumet) Continues the theme of the negative effects of ongoing globalization/corporatization and distracting the populace with entertainment rather than news. Ned Beatty's screed ("You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!") would have fit right in to The Hour of Trust.
- The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003, directed by Errol Morris) This documentary touches on all the themes of The Hour of Trust: corporate responsibility, the change in corporate culture, and the military-industrial complex. McNamara was a big proponent of process improvement and analytics, so he pulls no punches in critiquing the mistakes of his life, especially Vietnam.
You can easily find all three films on most streaming platforms.
Michael, if we were to ever do a bonus episode about one of these films, which would you most like us to cover? (No promises, but we're always looking ahead and always looking to branch out).
The Fog of War is pretty straight forward and a discussion would be superfluous. Network has the most relevance, but most folk already understand its message.
I would go with Rollerball because it is speculative fiction. Also, most folk only notice the superficial story about a violent sport and miss the underlying themes.
Awesome. It's on the list.