His name was Lewis Powell, and the memo became known simply as The Powell Memo. Then, in 1971 a lawyer, member of the Philip Morris Board of Directors and Chair of a committee inside the US Chamber of Commerce decided to draft a call to arms to win America back, for corporations. “Before the policy winds shifted in the ’60s, business had seen little need to mobilize anything more than a network of trade associations,” they write. Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. The main role of lobbyists in Washington was to “troll for government contracts and tax breaks,” according to Jacob S. It’s hard to imagine now, but until this point American corporations had relied mostly on informal access to politicians, via personal contacts. Those in the business community who were opposed to these measures (for whatever reasons) found themselves on the back foot.

Even Republican Richard Nixon’s election in 1969 didn’t turn this around – he started the Environmental Protection Agency. Washington was regulating business in the form of new protections for the environment, occupational health and safety, as well as consumer protection. President Lyndon Johnson had aggressively championed his Great Society agenda for the total elimination of poverty and racial injustice. In the late 1960s, long before Ronald Regan would declare that ‘government is the problem,’ the US government believed it had an active role to play in making America work for everyone.

Powell memo