Capital Gain

Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America is a 2017 edited volume by American historians Richard R. John and Kim Phillips-Fein. The volume was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press as part of the Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture series. The book brings together eleven essays by historians that investigate the engagement of business leaders with governmental institutions in the United States during the twentieth century, at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Based in many cases on the archival holdings of the Hagley Museum and Library, the contributors cover subjects ranging from the founding of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and municipal boosterism in the 1920s to military procurement, patent policy, postwar economic development, corporate civil rights, and business opposition to the Vietnam War. The collection argues that the relationship between business and politics in the United States was more varied and less consistently adversarial than is often assumed, and that business leaders frequently sought to expand, rather than minimize, the capacity of the state when doing so served their interests.