Papers presented by Erika Rappaport since 2019

2022 Mexico City

"'Aims of Industry': Big Business, Public Relations and the Fight against Nationalization in Britain and the Commonwealth, 1940s-1960s"

Abstract:

In the midst of the Second World War, the British Labour government began to lay out its postwar plans for social welfare and the nationalization of industry. At the same time, socialist-oriented anti-colonial movements also threatened to nationalize British industries in newly created nations. We know a great deal about such efforts, but little about new right-wing PR firms responded to this apparent threat to the empire and capitalism. This paper explores the emergence of PR in the British Commonwealth, and argues that decolonization and the rise of Labour governments created new business opportunities for the fledging field of PR in Britain. Beginning in the 1940s, a host of new firms --the most important being--Aims of Industry, Ltd. worked for a variety of industries under threat of nationalization, including trucking, cement, steel, sugar to lobby government, workers and consumers. Led by Tate and Lyle, a firm that wielded monopolistic power over the sugar industry, sugar also developed one of the most successful PR campaigns in Britain. under the employ of Tate and Lyle, Aims of Industry developed a famous PR campaign to promote free enterprise in the UK. Among many other slogans, the phrase “Tate not State,” was printed on sugar packets, packages, toys and advertising at home. In the Commonwealth sugar’s PR explained how “private interests” rather than public bureaucrats would create health, happiness, and progress. It especially focused on how growing, refining and consuming sugar would lead to development, modernity and racial and social equality. This story deliberately suppressed significant aspects of the colonial past and fought tooth and nail against state-centered forms of development throughout the Commonwealth and Great Britain. This campaign became also became a model for other industries that sought to fight “socialism” in colonies undergoing decolonization and in postcolonial nations thereafter. The sugar industry became a major voice of capitalism during decolonization and the Cold War.

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