This pitch has its best salesman in Paul Johnson. In one of the book's few unbridled pro-business polemics, Johnson argues in a 1999 essay that the so-called robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th century - John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, et al. - are unfairly maligned and should be placed alongside the Pilgrim fathers and the founding fathers as, he suggests, our "prospering fathers." "By achieving enormous economies of scale, they turned the luxuries of the rich into the necessities of the poor," Johnson writes, and if Rockefeller was ruthless in building his oil empire, this was a necessary evil on the road to progress.
Nobody fed the fire of progress more than Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1912, proposed that productivity could soar if tasks were broken down into fast, easily repeated steps. He was right, and millions of workers - on assembly lines, in offices - became less individuals than replaceable parts. The time it took to assemble a Ford Model T chassis, for instance, dropped from 12 and a half hours to 90 minutes. Soon, middle-class Americans could afford to buy them.
Taylorism prevailed, but it had its consequences. Muckraking, for one; organized labor, for another. Neither is given much attention in Colossus (and where's an index?), though Beatty does give some space to modern reactions to corporate excess like "socially responsible" investing. But here's the thing: Now's as good a time as any to fight for the integrity of the individual. For 20 years, since Ronald Reagan came in to office and on through the prosperous Clinton years, corporations have never faced less criticism. If 1901 needed muckrakers and crusaders, so does 2001, if only to make things more interesting.
But most opposition - the anti-WTO crowd, for instance - is marginal and undisciplined. Ralph Nader's watershed exposes have devolved into shrill sanctimony. The corporation's gifts remain too tempting for most people to reject them simply because they extract a social cost. William Whyte's Organization Man - the docile white-collar employee who trusts the corporate culture, who's willing to trade his self for safety - may have been replaced by new-economy "free agents" now that corporations no longer offer lifetime tenure to employees. But the basic faith in the American corporation is as widely held as it was in the '50s.
Ironically, the modern corporation has become expert at catering to us as individuals. General Motors spotted this early, out-niching Ford by targeting certain car models to certain demographics. In one of the book's most fascinating selections, Richard S. Tedlow draws out how Henry Ford's satisfaction with selling one car to the masses was ultimately self-defeating; only by segmenting the market, and by building obsolescence (model years) into the equation, did GM tap the American fixation with individualism.
That paradox is the backbone of modern marketing: demographics, psychographics, branding, advertising. Individual freedom is now a sales pitch. We have become a nation of consumers, not citizens.
Yet the myth is still there. The Silicon Valley garage, the Internet boom: Businesses aren't just about making money but are the ultimate entrepreneurial expressions of individuality. It's hard to make it stick, though. Some of these newfangled corporations have regressed into the traditional model (Johnson considers Bill Gates, for instance, a latter-day prospering father); others have utterly failed or been plucked up by behemoths during the shakeout, the individual myth finely sliced into a thousand bizarre and untenable business plans. (Insert your own Niche.com quip here.)
Beatty's fine book ends before the rise of the Internet Economy. But it's not hard to see where the road leads: The pitch will be perfected. Amazon.com is already close. Not only does it aspire to empower employees as individuals, but it also targets individual customers with algorithmic precision. As the targeting gets better, more pervasive and more accepted, the tension between corporate power and individual well-being will evaporate into a mind-numbing passivity. Now that's progress.
