The U.S. Businessman: Public Hero or Pariah?

Just as so many Communist Bloc countries look wistfully, even admiringly, upon the market economy, the United States has a horde of brokers, bankers and business leaders who seem to have done their utmost to destroy the credibility of the system. Free enterprise can be freebooting enterprise.

To those of us old enough to remember, this should be no surprise. The American business leader’s right to public respect has not been a given during this century. His persona has, in fact, cyclically alternated between that of hero and pariah.

Capitalism can be undermined by devious capitalists, just as socialism can be wrecked by despotic socialists. Corruption, alas, can live in high places everywhere. After an unceasing barrage of errancies in the U.S. financial community, the proud business posture on an alabaster pedestal, so dominant during the earlier Reagan years, seems to be teetering.

Some historical review is in order. The uncritically high regard for successful business leaders during the early ‘80s hardly touches the reverence of the mindless ‘20s.

A best-selling book of the period--”The Man Nobody Knows”--exemplified the magnitude of this reverence. The author, famed New York advertising executive Bruce Barton, imagined Jesus and 12 like-minded associates as a group of small businessmen trying to conquer the world. In this story, they did.

As tasteless as this may seem to some of us right now, the odds were good that a “Son of the Man Nobody Knows” might have found an equally enthusiastic readership during the euphoria of the deregulation binge just a few years ago.

During the 1920s, leaders of commerce were apotheosized. The term “the American businessman” had a nice egalitarian ring to it, suggesting the small-entrepreneur. But this plain-Joe rubric also applied to moguls, major industrialists, financiers, stock underwriters and a wide array of rampant speculators. No mom-and-pop operations there--and certainly no moms in that man’s world.

The stock market crash of 1929, the collapse of the nation’s banking system and the impact of the Great Depression abruptly transformed public adulation of the American businessman into angry hostility.

The post-crash flurry of federal and state investigations followed by successful criminal prosecutions suddenly made the American businessman look like the face on the post-office wall. While economists might argue about the root causes of the Depression, many of the nation’s hitherto most distinguished moguls bore a huge share of responsibility.

Most dismaying to the general public was a peek into how this free market system had really worked: insider trading, stock-watering; below-market stock-price discounts enjoyed by old-boy networks of Wall Streeters; tax evasion, embezzlement; imprudent and unlawful bank loans among cronies--all were part of a web of tawdry situational ethics having no regard for the public interest.

Among the general public were millions of fleeced, foreclosed and unemployed people who almost overnight decided that the American businessman was a scoundrel.

New York seemed to be the center for scoundrels. As a student at Columbia University during the 1930s, I vividly recall a student friend from Oklahoma who was visibly terrified in new social situations; he was afraid that someone would learn his father was a banker.

Manhattan filmgoers of that period had developed an engaging populist custom of hissing and booing perceived evildoers in movie newsreels. The hisses in a large theater such as Radio City Music Hall could reach hurricane force when a picture of Adolf Hitler appeared. Many business leaders drew at least gales of hisses and boos. Occasionally, there was applause for such then-popular figures as President Franklin D. Roosevelt or Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.

The only applause I ever heard during a newsreel about a business leader was directed at Richard Whitney, once an F.D.R. classmate at Harvard and later a trustee of the New York Stock Exchange. He was shown arriving at the gates of Sing Sing to begin serving an embezzlement conviction.

The rehabilitation of the businessman as a fine figure began during World War II. An incredible unified effort by industrialists and workers broke all-time production records. The public warmed to such larger-than-life figures as Henry J. Kaiser, who was producing Liberty Ships at a hyperbolic daily rate. Public respectability grew during the prosperity of the postwar years and reached a new peak during the Reagan era.

Now it seems to be hurtling down again, below the bottom line. Mammoth S&L; scandals for which every taxpayer will pay, insider tradings on Wall Street, corrupt manipulations in Chicago’s commodities markets, defense-contract frauds, junk bond fiascoes and attendant bankruptcies--a list that seems interminable. Nor is the business image helped by the life styles of some leaders; only an oxymoron--neo-decadence--can describe their conspicuous consumption.

I feel a revived need to hiss and boo. I’ve even tried it while watching TV but it’s not the same; nothing replaces the therapeutic value of a shared sense of outrage enjoyed in the theaters of long ago. Perhaps some Hollywood wunderkind could stitch TV news snippets of dubious public figures into a one-minute sketch for distribution to our dinky little multiplexes.

Call the short film “Love--or Hisses”; encourage the audience to applaud or hiss and boo. Shown just before the feature picture, it would do much to clear the public psyche.

Imagine what the audience would do watching film of an S&L; leader arguing that regulators made him do it. Imagine the salutary lessons it might teach audiences in Bucharest or Budapest.