Over the course of the twentieth century the popular perception of America's giant corporations has undergone an astonishing change. Condemned as dangerous leviathans in the century's first decades, by 1945 major corporations had become respected, even revered, institutions. Roland Marchand's lavishly illustrated and carefully researched book tells how large companies such as AT&T and U.S. Steel created their own "souls" in order to reassure consumers and politicians that bigness posed no threat to democracy or American values.

Marchand traces this important transformation in the culture of capitalism by offering a series of case studies of such corporate giants as General Motors, General Electric, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and Du Pont Chemicals. Marchand examines the rhetorical and visual imagery developed by corporate leaders to win public approval and build their own internal corporate culture. In the "golden era" of the 1920s, companies boasted of their business statesmanship, but in the Depression years many of them turned in desperation to forms of public relations that strongly defended the capitalist system. During World War II public relations gained new prominence within corporate management as major companies linked themselves with Main-Street, small-town America. By the war's end, the corporation's image as a "good neighbor" had largely replaced that of the "soulless giant." American big business had succeeded in wrapping increasingly complex economic relationships in the comforting aura of familiarity.

Marchand, author of the widely acclaimed Advertising the American Dream (1985), provides an elegant and convincing account of the origins and effects of the corporate imagery so ubiquitous in our world today.

Roland Marchand (1933-1997) was Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and authored numerous works on American cultural history.

“Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business is an outstanding achievement and deserves a wide audience. . . .Business people could learn a lot from this masterful history of how their predecessors have presented themselves to the public. . . . Corporate America emerges from Creating the Corporate Soul as not only without a soul but without any cogent, coherent, internally consistent set of beliefs.”—Business History Review

“[Marchand’s] last book arfully melds business history and cultural history as it recreates the struggle of corporate executives to wrap their enterprises in the imagery of intimacy and neighborliness.”—The New Republic

“Creating the Corporate Soul [is] thorougly researched and beautifully illustrated. . . . [Marchand’s] tone of almost magisterial objectivity seems just right for a subject that would wither from either sarcasm or enthusiasm. . . . His conclusion is well earned: big busness may not have found a soul but it found a reasonably social facsimile of one.”—New York Times Book Review

"Marchand's masterful study of the creation of the corporate image is a classic, to be put alongside his Advertising the American Dream. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in business, technology, consumer culture, and advertising in the twentieth century."—Jeffrey L. Meikle, University of Texas at Austin

"More than any other historian, Roland Marchand has illuminated the murky crannies of our nation's underculture, in the process showing us how much of our national mythology is both reflected in and created by such once-scorned arts as advertising and public relations. Creating the Corporate Soul is a magisterial baring of the American psyche fashioned by the grandfathers and godfathers of today's spin doctors. It ranks with such great business histories as Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience and Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand."—Randall Rothenberg, author of Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story

Hagley Prize in Business History, Hagley Museum and Library