Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1950. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 430-452).

"Employers, Unite!" argues that the anti-union campaign of Progressive-Era organized employers molded in crucial ways the shape of labor relations in the United States, and that to understand the development of ideas about work, business, and labor unions, we need to understand how these employers gained and wielded political and societal power.The study concentrates on the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which spearheaded what it termed the "open-shop'' campaign. Focusing attention on the unions' demand for the closed or union shop, the NAM shifted the debate over labor relations from workplace conditions to the legitimacy of unions as representatives of workers, identifying not employers but union leaders as the source of injustices.At the heart of the study is an analysis of over 100 active members of the NAM, organized through a relational database constructed with the help of recently digitized materials like local histories and biographical compendia. Besides basic information like company size or demographics, the database maps information about NAM members' social and political contacts. Substantial archival materials further ground the study's analysis of the NAM's structure and influence.Research on the membership has allowed me to uncover information that focusing on the leadership would not have revealed. For example, I have found that a high percentage of active NAM members were party activists and officials, mostly in the Republican party; their positions in the party hierarchy gave them influence over political nominations and Congressional committee appointments. Active NAM members also regularly had personal contacts to politicians ranging from governors to Senators; these contacts further bolstered the Association's power, enabling it to torpedo much of labor's legislative project.The study also compares the NAM to other business organizations, especially the National Civic Federation (NCF). The NCF promoted cooperation with moderate unions, a position which the NAM frequently and vehemently criticized. Rhetorical differences, however, masked an underlying agreement among businessmen regarding the undesirability of unions. The rhetorical disjuncture between the organizations served to constrain debate on labor relations: the NAM's stridency made the NCF appear genuinely progressive and thereby undercut other, more far-reaching critiques of existing workplace relations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 687-714).

This dissertation examines the political, social, and economic responses to the end of the Bretton Woods system from 1971-1988 in the United States. It offers a “pre-history” of globalization which focuses on a period when international economic entanglement became a question of serious political debate within the U.S., but before “globalization” became common parlance. Contemporaries referred to the world after Bretton Woods as newly characterized by “interdependence,” a concept which highlighted vulnerability to external economic forces and declining national autonomy. This dissertation argues that far from enthusiastically embracing market globalization in this period, U.S. policymakers worked to supervise and manage global integration, and insulate workers, consumers, businesses, and themselves from the full force of the world economy. Restoring domestic social conflict to the center of our understanding of international economic policy, it investigates how labor unions and federations like the UAW and the AFL-CIO, business lobbying organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, and officials in the Treasury, Congress, and the Federal Reserve conflicted over their response to growing economic entanglement deep into the 1980s. It excavates a history of protectionism, planning, subsidies, industrial policy, currency politics, and other forms of state intervention—often driven by elites in the industrial Midwest and Northeast. The result of these collisions was an ambivalent and fragmented national approach to global integration which persisted until more recently than typically assumed. Rather than being driven by a coherent ideological vision for American power, or a clear-cut embrace of neoliberal theory, foreign economic policy was propelled forward by a much more contingent, ad-hoc, and conflictual process across this period. When globalization took on truly historical force in the 1990s, it was not because social conflicts over interdependence had been resolved, but because a more reluctant and resistant approach to global integration had lost its political and institutional foothold.