Apostles for Capitalism: Amway, Movement Conservatism, and the Remaking of the American Economy, 1959-2009
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE June 2019 Apostles for Capitalism: Amway, Movement Conservatism, and the Remaking of the American Economy, 1959-2009 Davor Mondom Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Mondom, Davor, "Apostles for Capitalism: Amway, Movement Conservatism, and the Remaking of the American Economy, 1959-2009" (2019). Dissertations - ALL. 1090. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/1090 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract This dissertation examines the Amway Corporation, the world’s largest multi-level marketing company. Since its inception, Amway has purported to offer individuals the ability to go into business for themselves and to participate in free enterprise through direct sales. At the same time, many have attacked Amway as a fraudulent pyramid scheme that trades in false promises and leaves its distributors financially and psychologically worse off than before they joined. In addition to running the company for over three decades, Amway’s cofounders, Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel, along with members of their families, have been influential players in the Republican Party and movement conservatism going back to the 1970s. Amway draws our attention to important subtleties in the post-World War II conservative movement. DeVos and Van Andel were prominent avatars of an ideology known as small-business conservatism. Like other champions of free enterprise, small-business conservatives attacked “big government,” but they additionally articulated a critique of corporate capitalism. Amway promoted an economic model known as “compassionate capitalism,” which was premised on the liberating potential of individual proprietorship. Amway also widens the geographic lens of the modern Right, highlighting the role that parts of the American North played in cultivating conservatism. Western Michigan, where DeVos and Van Andel were born and raised, has a long conservative tradition dating back to the mid-nineteenth century and shaped to a large degree by the region’s Dutch- American community, which practiced a particularly conservative strain of Calvinism. DeVos and Van Andel have had a hand in many of the key moments in the history of American Right over the last four decades, underscoring the importance of Grand Rapids to the conservative movement. APOSTLES FOR CAPITALISM: AMWAY, MOVEMENT CONSERVATISM, AND THE REMAKING OF THE AMERICAN ECONOMY, 1959-2009 By Davor Mondom B.A., Syracuse University, 2012 M.A., Syracuse University, 2015 M.Phil., Syracuse University, 2016 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Syracuse University June 2019 © Copyright 2019 by Davor Mondom. All rights reserved Acknowledgements It is my belief that the events and characters narrated by history compare with reality more or less as the portraits of authors on frontispieces of books usually compare with the authors themselves, that is to say they do so only in outline, so that they bear only a faint similarity to them, or sometimes none at all. -Arthur Schopenhauer1 No one is as good as their final product. That, in so many words, is the conceit of an acknowledgements section. Were I to repeat my graduate education, I would commit myself to reading the acknowledgments of every monograph I encountered. It is easy, especially for those of us early into our careers, as all students invariably are, to read a great book and think that we could never produce anything with as exquisite prose or with as much scholarly import as the person whose name graces the cover. But when you read the acknowledgements and take stock of the sheer number of individuals and institutions that that author relied upon, you realize that they, alone, could not have done it either, and that whatever the cover says, what you read was a team effort. This project is no different. For help in obtaining primary material, I want to thank Alex Forist at the Community Archives and Research Center at the Grand Rapids Public Museum, Valencia Jackson at the U.S. Circuit Court of Milwaukee, David Price at the U.S. District Court of Utah, Suzanne Guevara at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Heather Edwards at the Grand Rapids Public Library, Carol Lockman at the Hagley Library and Museum, the staff at the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan, John O’Connell at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, and Lydia Wasylenko at Syracuse University Libraries. I also want to thank those unknown to me who have made my work immeasurably easier, including the folks at Proquest, Newspaperarchive.com, and 1 Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. (New York, NY: Penguin, 2004), 222. !iv EBSCO, the employees at the Grand Rapids Press who for decades cut up every issue of their newspaper and stuffed the articles into little yellow subject envelopes, and the sellers on eBay who made their Amway cassettes available to me for purchase. For providing material support to conduct my research, I want to thank the Syracuse University history department, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse, and the Hagley Library and Museum. Various portions of this dissertation, from full paragraphs to scattered sentences and fragments of sentences, appear, occasionally in slightly amended form, as a standalone article in the third issue of the journal Modern American History, which is indicated accordingly in the notes. I want to thank the journal’s co-editors, Sarah Phillips and Brooke Blower, as well as the anonymous reviewers for all of their critiques, suggestions, and insights. Their remarks helped me to reframe the dissertation in ways that made it vastly superior to what it was prior. I have also presented various facets of this project at a number of conferences. Accordingly, I want to thank the commenters and audience members at the 2017 University of Rochester Graduate History Conference, the 42nd Annual Economic and Business History Society Conference, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Business History Conference, the SU History Department workshop series, and the 2019 Rochester Institute of Technology conference for their questions and comments. I am especially indebted to Professor Wade Shiltz at Luther College, who commented on my paper at the EBHS, for introducing me to the concept of small-business conservatism. I also want to thank the editorial team at the “Made by History” section of the Washington Post, especially Brian Rosenwald, for running my op-ed on Amway in October 2018.2 There are so many people at Syracuse who deserve my gratitude. Foremost among them, without question, is my advisor, Andrew Cohen. He first advised me as an undergraduate when I 2 Davor Mondom, “Compassionate Capitalism: Amway and the Role of Small-Business Conservatives in the New Right,” Modern American History, vol. 1 no. 3 (November 2018): 343-361; Davor Mondom, “The conservative business model that paved the way for the Trump presidency,” Made by History, The Washington Post, October 11, 2018, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/11/conservative-business-model-that-paved-way-trump-presidency/? utm_term=.51d73e4cd952 (accessed March 17, 2019). !v was completing my distinction thesis and I have stuck with him ever since. He alerted me to Amway as a potential dissertation topic, and it proved to be exactly what I was looking for — I could not have found a better topic if I tried. I also want to thank the other members of my dissertation committee: David Bennett, Carol Faulkner, Jeffrey Gonda, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Mark Rupert, and Elizabeth Shermer. Professors Bennett and Faulkner deserve special recognition. I have known Professor Bennett since my very first freshman semester; he sat on the committee for my distinction thesis as well as my dissertation proposal. Professor Faulkner was also on my proposal committee and read an early version of my MAH article. Beyond those faculty who have had a direct imprint on the project, I also want to thank Elizabeth Cohen, Michael Ebner, the late Ralph Ketcham, Andrew Lipman, and Mark Schmeller for their impact on my graduate (and, in certain cases, undergraduate) education. I have made a number of friends who have helped soften the edges of graduate school and provided welcome companionship. These include Sravani Biswas, Elissa Isenberg, Phil Erenrich, Tom Guiler, Giovanna Urist, Scarlett Rebman, and Shaundel Sanchez. Tom Bouril was gracious enough to proofread the entire dissertation before final submission. John Barruzza and I have had countless office conversations that have served as much-needed distractions from the day-to-day drudgeries of graduate life. Michael and Maria Britton have been friends almost from the get-go and have treated me to many a delicious meal at their home. My weekly lunches with Molly Jessup formed an indelible part of my early years. Morgan Kolakowski came into my life late in my tenure but has become as indispensable as anyone. There are not enough words to adequately catalog the emotional and material support that my parents have given me, not just during graduate school but throughout my entire life thus far. And at the risk of making this excessively human-centric, I must also acknowledge the joy that my three cats have brought me: Brainy, Merlin, and Zeus. Misha and Chowder also warrant commendation for their companionship towards the end. !vi This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather, Ivića Mondom. He passed away two years before it was completed, but I know he so would have wanted to live to see it done.