University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-2004 Corporate stories : Fortune magazine and modern managerial culture. Kevin S. Reilly University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Reilly, Kevin S., "Corporate stories : Fortune magazine and modern managerial culture." (2004). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 1301. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/1301 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CORPORATE STORIES: FORTUNE MAGAZINE AND MODERN MANAGERIAL CULTURE A Dissertation Presented by KEVIN S. REILLY Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2004 Department of History ©Copyright by Kevin S. Reilly 2004 All Rights Reserved CORPORATE STORIES: FORTUNE MAGAZINE AND MODERN MANAGERIAL CULTURE A Dissertation Presented By Kevin S. Reilly Approved as to style and content by: : ^ Kathy Peiss, Chaira Daniel Czitrom, Member^ Larry Owens, Member Linda Smircich, Member David Glassberg, Department Chair Department of History 1 For Sarah with love ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to the teachers I have had over the years. Their impact on this study has mainly been inspirational rather than direct, but I would hope they recognize their "fingerprints" in this present work. I would like to thank in particular Richard Ohmann who first introduced me to magazines as an undergraduate, as well as Joel Pfister, Richard Buel, Judith E. Smith, James Wallace, Robin Lydenberg, and Carl Nightingale. Above all, this project succeeded in large measure due to the patience and encouragement of my adviser Kathy Peiss. I could not have imagined a better mentor, editor, colleague, and friend to guide me through the thickets of the past few years. I want to thank those who read or commented on the work as it took shape. Kevin Boyle not only helped me clarify the project when I conceived it years ago, he has also been a first rate teacher who fundamentally shaped my understanding of social and political history. Philip Scranton offered valuable comments on a conference paper, and has expressed a humbling amount of support for the work since early on. The welcoming venue of the Business History Conference was a wonderful sounding board for ideas. I want to thank Paul Swann for providing a wonderful critique of a paper presented at the Hagley Library Seminar Series, and Roger Horowitz, Susan Strasser, Michael Nash, Christopher McKenna, and the other attendees of the seminar for their invaluable input. Gary Gerstle generously took time to discuss the project with me and was very helpful in clarifying the big picture. A number of scholars contributed directly to the research. Luce biographers James L. Baughman, Alan Brinkley, and Robert E. Herzstein offered research advice and encouragement. Larry Zacharias took interest in my work early on as well and kindly offered research suggestions. Historians Vicki Goldberg and Alice Marquis generously made their research notes available to me. Dan Clark, Jonathan Klick, Pamela Laird, Marcia Prior-Miller, Chris Mullen, and Mary Yeager each shared their work and/or valuable citations at various stages. Chris Heidenrich provided excellent research assistance at the Audit Bureau of Circulation. I thank the staffs of the many libraries and archives I used in writing this dissertation, but a few people deserve special mention. Kathleen Nutter and Karen Eberhart at the Smith College Archives, and Nancy MacKechnie and Jad Davis at Vassar College Special Collections helped with alumnae records. Dorothy Knaus at the University of Oregon and Lori Olson at the University of Wyoming gracefully fielded complicated telephone requests. Barbara Constable at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Marjorie McNinch at the Hagley Museum and Library, and Ellen Gartrell and Jacqueline Reid at the Hartman Center at Duke University made my stay in those institutions productive and enjoyable. I also want to thank John Kenneth Galbraith and Henry Luce, HI, who were willing to speak with me about their association with Fortune magazine, and Robert Wood and Christopher Reaske for making the necessary introductions to these men. The late Jenny Bell Whyte kindly spoke to me about her husband William H. Whyte, Jr. and offered help with my research related to him. In the long process of research and travel I was privileged to receive financial assistance from a number sources. The Department of History and the Graduate School of University of Massachusetts awarded me a Bauer-Gordon Summer Research Fellowship and a University Fellowship, respectively, as well as smaller travel grants. I vi also received travel grants from the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at Duke University. Here I also owe a second thanks to Roger Horowitz and Phil Scranton for supporting my work through a Hagley Library Grant-in-Aid in 1998, and more generally for introducing me to that wonderful institution and the scholars drawn to it. Their continuing support has been much appreciated. Thanks also to the members of the board of the Business History Conference for recognizing an early conference paper with the Newcomen Award, and to the Newcomen Society for funding that prize. Many friends and colleagues have tolerated my interest in Fortune and many more obscure things with good humor. Anna Creadick, Kevin Dunn, Rick Goulet, Jeff Hornstein, Tina Manko, Marian Mollin, Brad Paul, and Jen Wang have been the most spirited and invigorating of colleagues over the years. Terry and Alison Davis provided regular and essential diversions to keep me sane. A number of friends and family also provided housing for me on my various research trips. Thanks go to Alyson Brown; Greg, Janice, and Lizzie Smith; Sandra and Lee Waclawski; and the hospitable folks at Victorian Reflections Inn in Abilene, Kansas. I am particularly grateful to Ruth Scholz and Brenda Embry for long providing wonderful and indispensable childcare. Finally I want to thank my entire family for their love and support. Scott and Susan Reilly have always provided good cheer on our visits. Nathan Reilly provided housing in New York and Cambridge at various times in addition to periodic excursions and regular encouragement. Nick Hays has always been a great sounding board for ideas as well as a fine comrade. Lee and Betty Hays graciously provide much needed retreats vii in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania each year, in addition to right good conversation. Above all, I thank my mother Diana Reilly, and my late father James, for their lifetime of unconditional support and interest in my work. Particularly in the past few years, Mom was always ready to take on babysitting duties at a moment's notice. I could not have begun this project without them, much less have finished it. And, although they contributed absolutely nothing to this dissertation, I want to thank my three children, Eoin, Eszti, and Mariner, since they have contributed incalculably to my life. They always help "keep it real." My dear wife Sarah has contributed this much too, but she has also born the additional responsibility of supporting our family, reviewing drafts, retrieving library books, suffering the periodic absences of research trips, and generally keeping us afloat. Her unwavering love, encouragement, and patience have been more than I had any right to ask for. With that tiny gesture we academics have to offer, I dedicate this work to her. viii Abstract CORPORATE STORIES: FORTUNE MAGAZINE AND MODERN MANAGERIAL CULTURE MAY 2004 KEVIN S. REILLY, B.A., WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY M.A., BOSTON COLLEGE PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Kathy Peiss This dissertation uses Fortune magazine to explore the relationship between professional corporate managers and the cultural impulses of urban modernism after 1920. Fortune's reporting, photography and design is part of the larger story of business from 1930 to the early 1950s, and the dissertation argues that the magazine shaped executive subjectivity through core narratives and images. It ultimately linked the concepts of liberated individual leadership and institutional mastery. Fortune elaborated a specific vision of corporate organization and governance influenced by the staff's political sensibilities, and in so doing offered a useable cultural identity for the "managerial revolution." Chapter One interprets the magazine as a consumer item and discusses the ways Fortune interpellated its readers as a "business class." The layout of graphic designer Thomas Maitland Cleland was tailored to Henry Luce's vision of an elite audience of cosmopolitan executives. Chapter Two explores the aesthetic ideologies at work in portraying business as a modernist enterprise. It considers the contributions of Margaret Bourke- White to the Fortune innovation, the "corporation story," and examines the links those stories had to contemporary advertising narratives. Chapter Three turns to the magazine's staff, which included