Governments are run by humans who have sympathies and moods. The study of leaders' personalities, albeit not widespread, is an important tool for foreign policy analysis. Plus, friendship is a feeling that decision-makers like to express for each other. This paper analyses the activity of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's three times premier, who has made ‘friendship’ a central tenet of his personal foreign policy. Three cases are considered, namely, Berlusconi's relationship with George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin. The paper concludes that his friendship-based foreign policy has somehow worked; but, because he decided to ignore Italy's structural constraints in the international arena, he ended up wasting opportunities and resources.

With friends like these: foreign policy as personal relationship

“‘God Is My Partner’: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War” chronicles the early career of R. G. LeTourneau, an industrialist and lay preacher whose life challenges the historiography of mid-twentieth-century fundamentalism as apolitical and otherworldly. In the 1930s and 1940s, every businessman had to grapple with the expanding federal state under the New Deal and in World War II. LeTourneau exemplified theologically conservative evangelical resourcefulness under changing political and economic conditions. Born in 1888 to a Plymouth Brethren family, his cultural memory reached back to the evangelical business activism of the nineteenth century, while his future lay in the fundamentalist subculture that the Brethren did much to create. However, as a businessman, LeTourneau had little patience with doctrines dividing “the world” from the church. He integrated evangelicalism into his manufacturing and managerial roles, and pushed fundamentalist clergy to tap laymen's proselytizing energy. Between 1930 and 1943, the years on which this article focuses, LeTourneau attacked dilemmas that preoccupied other evangelical business men: higher taxes, greater regulation, a forceful labor movement, and the challenge, as he saw it, to uphold the gospel and private enterprise against communist subversion. Business men such as LeTourneau represented the front line of what scholars have too often dismissed as trivial: evangelical politics during the New Deal.

“God Is My Partner”: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War

The arsenal of democracy drops a stitch : WWII industrial mobilization and the Real Silk Hosiery Mills of Indianapolis, Indiana

Congress launched the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as an independent public corporation in 1933. The TVA had the authority to build and operate dams and to distribute the power from those dams, to initiate flood control, to make fertilizer, and to do much more. In contrast, Congress could not decide on the final scope and status of a regional power authority in the Pacific Northwest. It created the Bonneville Power Administration (Bonneville or BPA) in 1937 as a temporary agency within Secretary Harold L. Ickes's public power-friendly Department of the Interior. Bonneville was granted far less scope and authority than the TVA. And with each passing year, Congress considered revising or terminating it.

Fighting for Aluminum and for Itself The Bonneville Power Administration, 1939-1949

Abstract This article examines Rockefeller Republicanism and its status within the Republican Party by looking at the evolution of Nelson Rockefeller’s support for social welfare policy between 1958 and 1975. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller regularly appears in histories of modern conservatism as the embodiment of the liberalism that conservatives rejected, but these works rarely account for the entirety of Rockefeller’s career. Rather than focus on Rockefeller’s challenges to the national Republican Party in 1960 and 1964, which results in an incomplete representation of Rockefeller Republicanism, this article reassesses moderate Republicanism’s perceived dominance and Rockefeller’s advocacy for liberal domestic policies and commitment to racial liberalism in New York. A full account of Rockefeller’s struggles to find common ground with conservative New York Republicans and adoption of conservative positions related to law enforcement and welfare reform thwarted one of the GOP’s best opportunities to assemble a multiracial and cross-class constituency.

Defining Rockefeller Republicanism: Promise and Peril at the Edge of the Liberal Consensus, 1958–1975

Between World War I and World War II, America's corporate liberals experienced a profound ideological change. In the 1920s, corporate liberals embraced company-specific solutions to economic problems. They believed that if every company, in every industry, employed advanced managerial techniques -- such as granting workers non-wage benefits to increase their job satisfaction -- employment, production, and profits could be stabilized and prosperity sustained indefinitely. The Great Depression, of course, made a mockery of this idyllic vision. Corporate liberals admitted that private efforts failed to maintain the nation's economic health, ultimately endorsing large-scale government intervention to bail out the stricken economy. By 1935, the corporate liberal conversion from privatism to business-government partnership was well under way. Corporate liberals served President Franklin Roosevelt throughout the Depression and preparedness periods. Marion Folsom of Eastman Kodak Corporation, Edward Stettinius, Jr. of United States Steel, and others joined New Deal agencies struggling to re-employ workers and bring about social security. Later, at Roosevelt's request, they entered emergency preparedness bodies to ready the United States for the possibility of war. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the reconfigured American economy (which the corporate liberals had done so much to create) proved capable of mass producing weapons and other equipment. The bottom line, staunchly revisionist in nature, is that the corporate liberals ran an effective mobilization campaign, overcoming isolationist resistance to rearmament, Roosevelt's reluctance to grant them genuine authority, and other constraints. Richard E. Holl is Professor of History at the Lees College Campus of Hazard Community and Technical College. His latest article, on Axis prisoners of war in Kentucky, won the Collins Award of the Kentucky Historical Society.

Richard E. Holl

Papers

From the Boardroom to the War Room: America's Corporate Liberals and FDR's Preparedness Program