In the fi rst third of the twentieth century, as the United States underwent far-reaching corporate reorganization, fi nancial innovation, and social reform, a relatively small group of people wrestled publicly with big questions about economic equity, cultural values, and organizational form. Although a number of big businessmen and fi nancial tycoons fi gured prominently in those debates, recent historiography oft en reads these men out of this era's intellectual and policy debates or treats them as narrow and narrowly self-interested economic actors, though in the last few years a new generation of historians of capitalism has begun to rethink the place of the businessman in American public life. 1 Th en, too, an older scholarly literature does chart the business communities' role in debating and forging early twentieth-century American political economy. Th is 1970s-era scholarship demonstrates the critical role "corporate liberals" played in infl uencing New Deal reforms and the ways in which "welfare capitalism" prefi gured statist solutions to American economic insecurity and class confl ict. 2 Certainly, as this literature argues, some businessmen were "corporate liberals" who leaned toward New Deal reforms. Many, however, were not. Th ey opposed the New Deal and insisted on diff erent approaches to Americans' concerns about economic insecurity and relative material deprivations. Th ey were the people who, as a few historians have recently shown, would spearhead the modern conservative movement. 3 One of the most prominent and infl uential of these conservative businessmen was John J. Raskob. Raskob's answers to the political economy crises