Global Policy Forum

By Robert Weissman

The Mayor of Palermo, Sicily, Leoluca Orlando, was in Washington, D.C. the other day, telling reporters how the citizens of his fair city led a cultural revolt against the Mafia. Make no mistake, the Mayor cautioned, the Mafia still had its grips on some of the city's businesses, but the Mafia no longer dominates Palermo's institutions. After especially brutal Mafia executions of two Sicilian judges, one citizen scrawled anti-mafia signs on a bedsheet and hung it from her window. Then others joined in. The "Committee of the Sheets" was formed. The bedsheet protest caught on until the vast majority of city residents were hanging bedsheets.

"On certain days, you could look up at an apartment building and see where the Mafia don lived -- it was the apartment without a bedsheet hanging from its window," the Mayor told reporters. The bedsheet protest was followed by marches, sit-ins, demonstrations. The populists didn't let up until the Mafia's grip on the city was broken.

Orlando was touring the United States earlier this month, inviting fellow activists and reporters to come to Palermo in June to attend a conference on democracy and the rule of law. We asked Orlando whether lessons from Palermo's fight against the Mafia's grip on Sicily could be applied to break the grip of corporations in the United States. He cracked a little smile, then begged off, muttering something about not wanting to interfere in the internal affairs of a foreign country.

But we believe the lessons are applicable. After all, 100 years ago, the citizenry viewed corporations as soulless, amoral, sometimes evil conglomerations of capital. As Roland Marchand, the late University of California Davis Professor of American History, makes clear in Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (University of California Press, 1998), for all the legal legitimacy that the courts bestowed upon corporations at the turn of the century, corporations "conspicuously lacked a comparable social and moral legitimacy in the eyes of the public."

"The big business corporation, as a rising chorus of American voices chanted insistently from the 1890s onward, had no soul," Marchand writes. The corporation had no soul, it had no conscience, and was driven by a bottom line profit urgency that often trampled on the rights of living, breathing persons. "If some of the great entrepreneurs of the 1870s and 1880s had proved greedy and ruthless in their pursuit of profits, the new corporations of the 1890s and 1900s would have even fewer scruples," Marchand writes. "After all, one might appeal to the conscience of an individual businessman. But the soulless corporation, driven by a cold economic logic that defined its every decision as a money equation, had none."

Big Business realized that this public perception of the corporation as a cold, impersonal "thing" would hinder its domination of the political economy. So big corporations launched a 100-year public relations campaign to "create the corporate soul" -- to convince Americans that corporations had a moral purpose and were serving the public good. And it is clear today, to all but the most conflicted observers, that the campaign Marchand documents in his book has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its creators. Marchand amassed copies of thousands of corporate image ads, many of which illustrate Creating the Corporate Soul. In a chapter on AT&T, Marchand reprints a turn-of-the-century ad titled "Democracy: of the people, by the people, for the people" showing workers who are shareholders of AT&T. A similar AT&T ad from 1919 titled "Our Stockholders" shows a mother surrounded by two young sons perusing her stock certificates. Marchand dryly notes: "No plutocrats were visible here."

Today, the corporate hucksters have taken their public relations campaign to a laughable extreme, portraying, for example, corporations not just as friendly beings, but as friends of workers -- even as revolutionaries. As cultural historian Thomas Frank points out, Pizza Hut has a television commercial that sympathizes with labor organizers. According to Frank, the ad, titled "Strike Break," juxtaposes a group of "angry workers stomping around outside a factory with a group of generically concerned executives inside the building." A truck pulls up and delivers pizza to the striking workers, "who drop their picket signs and smile gratefully at the white-collar figures looking down on them from above."

"And so, thanks to the management team, a century of labor struggle has been swept away," Frank concludes. "The world of business is the world, period. There's nothing outside of it. Get as mad as you want -- the pizza trucks are standing by." In the face of this corporate onslaught, some may want to throw in the towel. We'd rather reach for the bedsheet.

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