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Kimberly Kathryn Phillips-Fein, Columbia University
"Boulwarism: The First Stage of Reaganism"Examining the thought and policies of Lemuel Boulware, the General Electric human relations manager in the 1950s and 1960s, this paper argues that many corporate leaders in the postwar era remained violently opposed to the new strength of organized labor. Even though they could not employ anti-union strategies as easily as they could before the Wagner Act, they developed a range of new tactics for fighting the organization of new unions and for limiting the strength of unions that already existing. Second, the paper argues that the economic ideas of Friedrich Hayek, Ludvig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt and even Milton Friedman played an important role in theworld-view and anti-union politics of these business leaders. Finally, it will argue that General Electric was a center of anti-union, free-market ideology in the 1950s, when Lemuel Boulware developed his particular hard-line anti-union policies, known at the time as Boulwarism.