“One Holistic System of Systems”: Multinational Conglomerates and Technocratic Bigness in Late Postwar Culture
Journal of American History, 108 (2):
320-347 (September 2021)DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaab124
Abstract
In July 1969 the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee met to reconvene its hearings on conglomerate corporations. The guests that day were the top executives at Gulf & Western Industries, a company that, just over a decade earlier, had been a middling auto parts manufacturer with $8 million in total sales. Eleven years, 127 mergers, and two name changes later, Gulf & Western had morphed into a sprawling empire with a cornucopia of products—from paint pigment and traffic lights to soul records and cigars—amounting to more than $1.3 billion in annual sales. Speaking on behalf of the firm, the Gulf & Western president David Judelson framed his opening statement with a series of rhetorical questions: “What is Gulf \& Western? Who is Gulf \& Western? How and why has Gulf \& Western developed?” His response was that the firm represented something altogether new in American life: a corporation that made diversification—the act of branching out into many unrelated fields—its foundational premise. True, this process required an aggressive acquisitions stance, but the end result was something of value: “a federation of small-, medium-, and large-sized corporations.” After hours of testimony, the subcommittee chair Emanuel Celler remained unconvinced. “Are you familiar with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Don Giovanni,” he asked the Gulf \& Western chief executive Charles Bluhdorn. The Viennese émigré was not, but he quipped that perhaps Paramount Pictures, a Gulf \& Western subsidiary, could make a film version. Unamused, Celler described a scene in which Giovanni's servant was asked how many mistresses the legendary Lothario kept; the servant responded by producing a chronicle that, when unfurled, spanned the entire stage. “I cannot help but make a comparison,” the chairman deadpanned, “between your Gulf & Western and Don Giovanni.”