ABSTRACT
New Deal reforms and the growth of government in the Second World War set the stage for the long economic expansion and cultural awakening of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. (A comparative study is in Groenewegen, 1997.) This was not a golden age, for the McCarthyism of the 1950s and the Cold War were harsh realities. The civil rights movement was weak, and the women’s movement did not come on strong until the middle of the 1960s (Halberstam, 1993). The labour movement peaked out and began declining during the era of the New Industrial State. In 1970 only 28 percent of the workforce in the US was in a union. Representation has fallen by nearly half since then-14.1 percent were in unions in 1997 (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1981:411; 1998:445). Nevertheless, two of the rough edges of earlier capitalism were blunted during the era of the New Industrial State-the insistence on unrestricted profit and on unrestrained markets. The giant corporations began placing less emphasis on profit and capital and more on production and technology. They began stabilising their activities by substituting internal planning for market bargaining. The central government had begun taxing corporate profits and also had begun stabilising aggregate demand in the national economy.
