The National Association of Manufacturers' Community Relations Short Film Your Town: Parable, Propaganda, and Big Individualism

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) faced growing antibusiness sentiment. In 1940, as part of a widespread propaganda campaign to assuage public concerns about industry and rehabilitate big business's reputation, NAM created and distributed the community relations short film, Your Town. The movie, pursuing an integration propaganda strategy, appealed to Americans' individualistic values by portraying industry as a beneficent fellow traveler who was a big individual—a heroic, larger-than-life figure who could make the land profitable and guard the citizenry against evil, antibusiness influences. Applying Vogler's (1997) synthesis of Campbell's (1949) heroic narrative form, this article shows that NAM's portrayal of industry as a hero has continued to resonate with strains of contemporary American thought that (a) sees business as the foundation for societal progress and stability and (b) conceptualizes the corporate entity as a person. Finally, this study finds that, although the language of corporate personhood has been implied in organizational community relations rhetoric for at least six decades, more recent events reveal a public that is more circumspect about the beneficence of the corporate persona.

Notes

¹The term propaganda stands for an initiative that features systematically-constructed messages (whether appearing in news, books, movie houses, or in speeches) designed to move mass audiences toward acceptance of attitudes, predispositions, and behaviors that will benefit a privileged group (Combs & Nimmo, 1993; Cunningham, 2002; Sproule, 1997).

² Your Town may be seen at http://www.archive.org/details/YourTown1940.

³Opening narration in the script, cut from the film, explains, “Mankind has engaged in a struggle [to] wrest from nature the good things of life” (NAM, 1939b, p. 1).

⁴When discussed as an allegorical figure within the Your Town script, we refer to this persona as Industry.

⁵For example, one line of the opening title roll read was changed from “defend them against all onslaught” in the script to a less definitive “defend them” in the film.

⁶In fact, this is where the film began as Grand-Dad's recollections have accounted for the necessary previous steps of the hero's journey.

⁷A NAM promotional pamphlet adds “and then a stone was thrown through a factory window” (NAM, n.d.-c, p. 1).

⁸Although not blatant in Your Town, NAM's rhetoric often comingled the idea of spirituality with hardy industrialism. In undated speech materials it provided its membership in the late 1930s, it claimed that “God left the world unfinished that we, His immortal sons, might feel its challenge and take the raw material and put the picture puzzle together” (NAM, n.d.-d, p. 4). And, as for those who do not understand how industry helps all: “Save America from the sit-down strikes of ignorance and idleness and surcharge her with the energy and dreams of an Almighty God and a free and industrious people” (NAM, n.d.-d, p. 6).