NEWS FROM THE INQUIRE CAPITALISM TEAM
Our database of corporate archives continues to grow. We are confident that by the end of Spring 2022 there will be over 1,000 curated entries on the catalog and we will continue to expand the list and the diversity of entries. This semester we are focusing on adding bibliographic references to the entries to further support research about the company and the industry.
The Inquire Capitalism database is open for contributions. Send us your contribution through our website or by email to inquirecapitalism@history.clas.ufl.edu. For more information contact Professor Sean Adams, director of the Inquire Capitalism Program at the University of Florida (spadams@ufl.edu).
Rainbow capitalism; what is it and how can we research it?
by Shannon Scott
Rainbow capitalism is a term used to describe how businesses retain and attract customers through marketing specifically toward queer people. For a significant part of American history, this marketing was either unintentional or covert due to the criminalization and stigma surrounding the queer community. Stonewall Inn, popularized by the then-nascent queer press, drew in customers despite routine police harassment, heralding an era of queer visibility in the mainstream. Aside from the 1980s, when the sociopolitical climate became more hostile to queer people, businesses including Absolut and IKEA incorporated queerness by, respectively, appearing in queer media outlets or including queer people in commercials. More research and archival work are needed to determine the effectiveness and perception of such measures.
In the 2010s and 2020s, particularly following the legalization of queer marriage in 2015 in the US, rainbow capitalism has become ubiquitous. Companies may change their logo during June, like Raytheon, or publish articles about their score on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, like Aramark. Within the queer community, however, the perception of rainbow capitalism is mixed. On the one hand, a company donating to queer-friendly charities or improving workplace protections for queer people is a cause for celebration. At the very least, it indicates that there has been some level of social progress, since it is no longer a branding death-sentence to portray queer experiences. On the other hand, companies can score a perfect 100 on the Corporate Equality Index while simultaneously donating to politicians who legislate against LGBT causes, and marketing may focus primarily on the parts of the queer community that are more likely to have disposable income. One example is Gilead Science’s medicine for HIV-positive people, which remains prohibitively expensive for many queer people.
These actions reflect a broader trend of phenomena labelled either corporate social responsibility (the more positive term), pinkwashing, greenwashing, or other neologisms that indicate skepticism about a company’s motivations. In response, some organizations are pushing for greater visibility regarding minority-owned businesses, as Franchise Business Review recently did for Black-owned franchises, and the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce continues to do for queer-owned businesses. Ultimately, the relationships between queer communities and businesses requires more historical exploration, especially given the difficulties of studying queer history due to severe marginalization. Over recent years, researchers wishing to gauge the public perception of rainbow capitalism may gain a great deal of insight from searchin businesses’ social media accounts or reading articles published by queer news sites like Pink News. While academic publications related to rainbow capitalism and queer business history are scarcer, Inquire Capitalism hopes to make information on the topic more accessible for anyone with an interest in the subject.
(More about Shannon Scott here).
Interview with Dr. Adam Arenson (Manhattan College)
talking about his experience researching the corporate architecture for his book Banking on Beauty: Millard Seats and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California
The Inquire Capitalism podcast is a new show where we interview scholars and archivists about their experiences working with business records.
[What follows is an edited transcript of Episode 5 of the IC podcast show. Listen to the episode here]
On the 5th episode of the Inquire Capitalism podcast we interview Dr. Adam Arenson; he teaches the history and memory of North America and the global 19th century at Manhattan College. His work focuses on the cultural and political history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, as well as the development of cities. In 2020 he published Banking on Beauty: Millard Seats and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California, published in 2020 by University of Texas Press, which he graciously talked about with us.
[Dr. Adam Arenson’s research and inspiration for the book originated in … ]
Adam Arenson, (AA): I really am a 19th-century historian by training and my first book was about Civil War St. Louis, and it involved the Mercantile Library records. I had a sense of the richness of business records and their interplay with artists.
This project came out of the fact that I’m from San Diego and I grew up looking at these buildings that had been built by Home Savings and Loan, and that the artwork displayed local history, often 19th-century history. But I really didn’t know how many of them there were. I didn’t know who Millard Sheets was. I didn’t know when they were done, but I had the chance to spend some time in California and start researching it. And then I ended up writing a book about Mid-Century Modern art architecture and corporate patronage in the 20th century. That was really very far from what my first book did, but I think it helped me think about cities and the role businesses play in their identity.
Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, (PCF): […] When you research corporate architecture, where do you find the records? Do you find the records at the design studio, walk around and take photographs of your sources … ?
AA: […] I really did start on the street. I started by driving to the locations I knew. I started this project after Home Savings had been purchased by Washington Mutual. And then in the financial crisis, Washington Mutual sort of overnight became part of JPMorgan Chase. And at that moment, I was worried about what was going to happen to these buildings and whether Chase, which was based in New York, really understood this California-based project. So I went around, I took pictures, I started a website and I said, I think there may be 15 of these buildings. [I asked] Can somebody tell me more? … and very quickly people who had worked in the studio, people who were the children of the artists [came forward]. Howard Ahmanson is the name of the person who had founded Home Savings and Loan and his son, who helps manage the Ahmanson Foundation and has his own company, Fieldstead, that they contacted me. And so in some ways, the sources found me. I ended up finding out that there are more than 200 of these locations and that they are in California, but also in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Missouri. There is one in New York.
And it was a combination of things: some of the records that Home Savings had were being stored in a warehouse, and Chase was not super concerned about the records provided by a company that no longer existed. There were things like in the Ahmanson Foundation that they had in their own offices in the Fieldstead Company also. Then because Millard Sheets had such a long career as an artist and as a teacher, his papers were held by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and UCLA had done a series of oral histories with all kinds of artists who had lived in LA.
Through the art, I came to find corporate records –the correspondence between the artists and the various officials of the Savings and Loan, that is where I really was able to get access to some of what the Savings and Loan was thinking about, what their leadership wanted and how they thought about the cost of these buildings and how they thought about the locations. But Ahmanson, I actually quoted in the book, that he said he doesn’t care what historians are going to do […] He want[ed] to focus on doing the business of the savings and loan and making money and being good community partners. His records are slightly better than he let on, because other people kept his memos and some of his speeches. The people who worked for him and items like the contracts with the artists and the architects [were my best form of information].
[PCF: what is the relation with historical preservation?]
AA: [There is a strong connection with historical preservation]. These buildings, some of them are a little over 50 years old, and some of them are just reaching 50 years old. Since the [subjects] were 19th century mosaics, I really had no idea when they were done, but the first one was completed in 1955, and they continued to make artwork that reflected local history all around the country until about 1992. I was worried that these buildings were going to get torn down –some of the mosaics have been saved, some of them have been lost. There is also stained glass and sculptures. The buildings themselves are interesting buildings, but they have been altered a lot by both Home Savings and by Washington Mutual because banking had changed. They were built without ATMs. They were built without drive-thrus. And so obviously, as personal finance changed, the buildings themselves had been altered. [However] the artwork stayed the same, and I wanted to help the various conservation groups who can go out and write these landmark statements saying, [that] this is why this building is important and why we should save it locally.
[My intention was] to give them the background for how these projects were created so that we understood why they were done.
PCF: [How did the story] of your financier and the studio started?
AA: I’m part of an edited volume that Melissa Renn and Monica Jovanovich put together called Corporate Patronage of Art and Architecture. That really helps think about the way this can work differently [as] various companies have approached this differently. Home Savings and Loan in the 1950s [for example]. Ahmanson single handedly made the decisions. He was the person in charge and what he wanted happened. Part of his style was he knew Millard Sheets a little bit [though] Millard Sheets claims they did not know each other at all. It turns out their wives had been sorority sisters, so they had known each other a little bit socially. He called up Sheets unexpectedly. He said, come to lunch with me. They had lunch for three or four hours in Beverly Hills. They didn’t talk business at all.
And then as they drove back, Ahmanson pointed out the window and said,
– “That’s one of my properties, that’s another property.”
When they got back to his office in downtown LA, he [Ahmanson] said,
– “Do you want to build buildings”
and Sheets [said],
– “well, what do you want them to look like? How much did you spend?”
And said,
– “Well, just do it like you were doing it for yourself. Make me something beautiful.”
Sheets was willing to take [these guidelines for] lots of commissions. People would love to have that kind of freedom. Sheets liked it but he also was very nervous about it. So he created the vision of the first building [based on what] I argue he thought Ahmanson would want. Even though Ahmanson would not tell him what to do, [Sheets] knew that Ahmanson was interested in yachting.
[As such] he made space in Ahmanson’s office for yachting trophies. He put images of boats and people at the ocean in the Lakewood Branch, which was done very early [on in the two men’s relationship]. They used a combination [of] timeless images of leisure and local images of California. Sheets did things like buy mature trees and put [these] trees [around Ahmanson’s buildings] rather than little saplings.
Sheets just created a kind of oasis [that were sometimes] called cathedrals of finance [based on the fact that] they were very dark from the outside. Often [buildings] didn’t have windows on the main street [which] was like a kind of billboard in mosaic. You would walk into this double-height, darkened room with stained glass windows and it was almost like a religious experience. Ahmanson was invested in tract housing and catering to people who had money through the GI Bill to get their first home as his image of the postwar suburb and the single-family house is very much tied in with the success of Home Savings and Loan.
Ahmanson went very quickly from someone who had been in the fire insurance business to somebody who was running the largest savings and loan [business] in the United States from the late 1950s until the early 1990s.
PCF: [is it mostly banking] or the financial sector, the sector that sponsored this architecture and building big buildings and art?
AA: Home Savings was ahead of the curve, for sure. What happens in the 1980s is you get these 1%-for-art programs where all kinds of companies are incentivized to have public art, to have sculptures, to have public spaces on their property, so they can build taller or do other things that they wanted to do differently with the zoning laws. But the good news is, it becomes common, [the public art spaces]. What I think happens in that period is we get a lot of abstract sculptures.
[These sculptures] are sort of plopped down and don’t really seem to speak to their environment. Where Home Savings tried very hard. They would go meet with the local chamber of commerce, [which] you can see in [their] correspondence. [They say,] “We’re going to build a bank in Santa Cruz.” [Then,] they go to the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce, and they ask, “What’s distinctive about Santa Cruz, what’s an important building, who’s an important person?.” And then they tried to work that into the mosaics.
Home Savings tried to become a local landmark on arrival because they tried to depict something local. [For example,] the ones in Texas have cowboys and the ones in Chicago have a local fire engine and a boat that is showing people going out onto Lake Michigan. Home Savings even tried in places where they really did not have a history, where they were just expanding in the 70s and 80s, to tell something about local history. So, I do think there are other corporate art programs, but they do not seem as tied into the local community in the way that Home Savings really tried to be.
PCF: [… when] you walk streets, city centers, in cities across the United States and everywhere, really, you can see that the large buildings all are sponsored by big companies and so their names and logos are displayed. [These buildings] are part of our collective memory and they are intertwined with social and cultural landscapes [as explained in your book. Please expand on the issue of collective memory.]
AA: What we see now is that companies understand the power [naming] a sports arena or a new tall tower, like the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, [how] that name gets repeated. It gets used in news reports, in the weather and traffic [coverage]. [This] really ties you in with the community. The good news is, I think a lot of these landmark buildings, [in hiring architects,] really try to have a distinctive vision.
The Transamerica Tower, or the [Transamerica Pyramid], for example, by William Pereira in San Francisco. People hated it. People really did not like it. And now it is very much when people think about San Francisco, that is one of the distinctive things, [like] the Golden Gate Bridge or Coit Tower. We will see if the Salesforce Tower has the same kind of power […]? Companies are trying to use architecture to show their importance and their permanence. I think in the landscape, the Home Savings buildings are two-story buildings on large lots. They picked prominent corners. They built small buildings and they had big parking lots because they wanted their patrons to very easily be able to park and walk in. From a real estate point of view, that’s why these buildings have been torn down over time. The Home Savings [buildings] in downtown LA and in downtown Glendale, and a few other places, were torn down [by the company, since a two-story building, as compared to a tower,] was not a great use of real estate to have such a small building and a big parking lot.
That’s been part of the preservation challenge. But the good news is, in some of these communities where these buildings are being torn down to build higher density, sometimes the building owner, but more often the local preservation group, is really saying, “No, this mosaic has meant a lot to us, [we need to keep it.”]. And thankfully, Brian Worley is the name of one of the members of the Sheets Studio who’s still live and active, and he knows how the [art] was installed, and he’s in a position to help uninstall them.
PCF: [for students and researchers of corporate patronage] What kind of skills and what should they start thinking about doing in terms of archives now?
AA: I think there is an opportunity to think outside of an established corporate archive. It is nice when they exist. And there are ways in which the archives at JPMorgan Chase, Ahmanson Foundation, and Fieldstead Company helped this project, but a lot of the work was done by going and looking at the buildings and looking for details, looking for cornerstones, looking for names, reading newspaper clippings. Some of these buildings when they opened, they were news. And so there were newspaper articles about the opening of these buildings. I could find names that way, figuring out who worked there, even people who had low-level jobs, like high school students working part time. They at least have the memory of stuff that goes back to the 50s and 60s. I was able to learn about their managers and how they were trained. And some of them had kept all kinds of materials that they had had from that period. The memos that I had from Howard Ahmanson were held by somebody who oversaw the printing, oversaw calendars, and photographs. He had all these memos from Howard Ahmanson from the early 60s saying, “This is what I want. This is what I don’t want.” And that was really my best opportunity to hear Ahmanson’s voice through these records because he tried so hard to hide his thinking about it. […] And if you find any name of somebody linked to the project, try to do a search for them and see if they have an archive as an architect or an artist.
[…] There are also all these other ways [into the project] because the community has its own memory of these things that, as something really becomes important to the community, it will appear in community letters or in newspapers and other ways that will tell you something about how the building or how the company was seen in its community.
On the 5th episode of the Inquire Capitalism podcast we interview Dr. Adam Arenson; he teaches the history and memory of North America and the global 19th century at Manhattan College. His work focuses on the cultural and political history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction, as well as the development of cities. In 2020 he published Banking on Beauty: Millard Seats and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California, published in 2020 by University of Texas Press, which he graciously talked about with us.
[Dr. Adam Arenson’s research and inspiration for the book originated in … ]
Adam Arenson, (AA): I really am a 19th century historian by training and my first book was about Civil War St. Louis, and it involved the Mercantile Library records. I had a sense of the richness of business records and their interplay with artists.
This project came out of the fact that I’m from San Diego and I grew up looking at these buildings that had been built by Home Savings and Loan, and that the artwork displayed local history, often 19th century history. But I really didn’t know how many of them there were. I didn’t know who Millard Sheets was. I didn’t know when they were done, but I had the chance to spend some time in California and start researching it. And then I ended up writing a book about Mid-Century Modern art architecture and corporate patronage in the 20th century. That was really very far from what my first book did, but I think it helped me think about cities and the role businesses play in their identity.
Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, (PCF): […] When you research corporate architecture, where do you find the records? Do you find the records at the design studio, walk around and take photographs of your sources … ?
AA: […] I really did start on the street. I started by driving to the locations I knew. I started this project after Home Savings had been purchased by Washington Mutual. And then in the financial crisis, Washington Mutual sort of overnight became part of JPMorgan Chase. And at that moment, I was worried about what was going to happen to these buildings and whether Chase, which was based in New York, really understood this California-based project. So I went around, I took pictures, I started a website and I said, I think there may be 15 of these buildings. [I asked] Can somebody tell me more? … and very quickly people who had worked in the studio, people who were the children of the artists [came forward]. Howard Ahmanson is the name of the person who had founded Home Savings and Loan and his son, who helps manage the Ahmanson Foundation and has his own company, Fieldstead, that they contacted me. And so in some ways, the sources found me. I ended up finding out that there are more than 200 of these locations and that they are in California, but also in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Missouri. There is one in New York.
And it was a combination of things: some of the records that Home Savings had were being stored in a warehouse, and Chase was not super concerned about the records provided by a company that no longer existed. There were things like in the Ahmanson Foundation that they had in their own offices in the Fieldstead Company also. Then because Millard Sheets had such a long career as an artist and as a teacher, his papers were held by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and UCLA had done a series of oral histories with all kinds of artists who had lived in LA.
Through the art, I came to find corporate records –the correspondence between the artists and the various officials of the Savings and Loan, that is where I really was able to get access to some of what the Savings and Loan was thinking about, what their leadership wanted and how they thought about the cost of these buildings and how they thought about the locations. But Ahmanson, I actually quoted in the book, that he said he doesn’t care what historians are going to do […] He want[ed] to focus on doing the business of the savings and loan and making money and being good community partners. His records are slightly better than he let on, because other people kept his memos and some of his speeches. The people who worked for him and items like the contracts with the artists and the architects [were my best form of information].
[PCF: what is the relation with historical preservation?]
AA: [There is a strong connection with historical preservation]. These buildings, some of them are a little over 50 years old, and some of them are just reaching 50 years old. Since the [subjects] were 19th century mosaics, I really had no idea when they were done, but the first one was completed in 1955, and they continued to make artwork that reflected local history all around the country until about 1992. I was worried that these buildings were going to get torn down –some of the mosaics have been saved, some of them have been lost. There is also stained glass and sculptures. The buildings themselves are interesting buildings, but they have been altered a lot by both Home Savings and by Washington Mutual because banking had changed. They were built without ATMs. They were built without drive-thrus. And so obviously, as personal finance changed, the buildings themselves had been altered. [However] the artwork stayed the same, and I wanted to help the various conservation groups who can go out and write these landmark statements saying, [that] this is why this building is important and why we should save it locally.
[My intention was] to give them the background for how these projects were created so that we understood why they were done.
PCF: [How did the story] of your financier and the studio started?
AA: I’m part of an edited volume that Melissa Renn and Monica Jovanovich put together called Corporate Patronage of Art and Architecture. That really helps think about the way this can work differently [as] various companies have approached this differently. Home Savings and Loan in the 1950s [for example]. Ahmanson single handedly made the decisions. He was the person in charge and what he wanted happened. Part of his style was he knew Millard Sheets a little bit [though] Millard Sheets claims they did not know each other at all. It turns out their wives had been sorority sisters, so they had known each other a little bit socially. He called up Sheets unexpectedly. He said, come to lunch with me. They had lunch for three or four hours in Beverly Hills. They didn’t talk business at all.
And then as they drove back, Ahmanson pointed out the window and said,
– “That’s one of my properties, that’s another property.”
When they got back to his office in downtown LA, he [Ahmanson] said,
– “Do you want to build buildings”
and Sheets [said],
– “well, what do you want them to look like? How much did you spend?”
And said,
– “Well, just do it like you were doing it for yourself. Make me something beautiful.”
Sheets was willing to take [these guidelines for] lots of commissions. People would love to have that kind of freedom. Sheets liked it but he also was very nervous about it. So he created the vision of the first building [based on what] I argue he thought Ahmanson would want. Even though Ahmanson would not tell him what to do, [Sheets] knew that Ahmanson was interested in yachting.
[As such] he made space in Ahmanson’s office for yachting trophies. He put images of boats and people at the ocean in the Lakewood Branch, which was done very early [on in the two men’s relationship]. They used a combination [of] timeless images of leisure and local images of California. Sheets did things like buy mature trees and put [these] trees [around Ahmanson’s buildings] rather than little saplings.
Sheets just created a kind of oasis [that were sometimes] called cathedrals of finance [based on the fact that] they were very dark from the outside. Often [buildings] didn’t have windows on the main street [which] was like a kind of billboard in mosaic. You would walk into this double-height, darkened room with stained glass windows and it was almost like a religious experience. Ahmanson was invested in tract housing and catering to people who had money through the GI Bill to get their first home as his image of the postwar suburb and the single-family house is very much tied in with the success of Home Savings and Loan.
Ahmanson went very quickly from someone who had been in the fire insurance business to somebody who was running the largest savings and loan [business] in the United States from the late 1950s until the early 1990s.
PCF: [is it mostly banking] or the financial sector, the sector that sponsored this architecture and building big buildings and art?
AA: Home Savings was ahead of the curve, for sure. What happens in the 1980s is you get these 1%-for-art programs where all kinds of companies are incentivized to have public art, to have sculptures, to have public spaces on their property, so they can build taller or do other things that they wanted to do differently with the zoning laws. But the good news is, it becomes common, [the public art spaces]. What I think happens in that period is we get a lot of abstract sculptures.
[These sculptures] are sort of plopped down and don’t really seem to speak to their environment. Where Home Savings tried very hard. They would go meet with the local chamber of commerce, [which] you can see in [their] correspondence. [They say,] “We’re going to build a bank in Santa Cruz.” [Then,] they go to the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce, and they ask, “What’s distinctive about Santa Cruz, what’s an important building, who’s an important person?.” And then they tried to work that into the mosaics.
Home Savings tried to become a local landmark on arrival because they tried to depict something local. [For example,] the ones in Texas have cowboys and the ones in Chicago have a local fire engine and a boat that is showing people going out onto Lake Michigan. Home Savings even tried in places where they really did not have a history, where they were just expanding in the 70s and 80s, to tell something about local history. So, I do think there are other corporate art programs, but they do not seem as tied into the local community in the way that Home Savings really tried to be.
PCF: [… when] you walk streets, city centers, in cities across the United States and everywhere, really, you can see that the large buildings all are sponsored by big companies and so their names and logos are displayed. [These buildings] are part of our collective memory and they are intertwined with social and cultural landscapes [as explained in your book. Please expand on the issue of collective memory.]
AA: What we see now is that companies understand the power [naming] a sports arena or a new tall tower, like the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, [how] that name gets repeated. It gets used in news reports, in the weather and traffic [coverage]. [This] really ties you in with the community. The good news is, I think a lot of these landmark buildings, [in hiring architects,] really try to have a distinctive vision.
The Transamerica Tower, or the [Transamerica Pyramid], for example, by William Pereira in San Francisco. People hated it. People really did not like it. And now it is very much when people think about San Francisco, that is one of the distinctive things, [like] the Golden Gate Bridge or Coit Tower. We will see if the Salesforce Tower has the same kind of power […]? Companies are trying to use architecture to show their importance and their permanence. I think in the landscape, the Home Savings buildings are two-story buildings on large lots. They picked prominent corners. They built small buildings and they had big parking lots because they wanted their patrons to very easily be able to park and walk in. From a real estate point of view, that’s why these buildings have been torn down over time. The Home Savings [buildings] in downtown LA and in downtown Glendale, and a few other places, were torn down [by the company, since a two-story building, as compared to a tower,] was not a great use of real estate to have such a small building and a big parking lot.
That’s been part of the preservation challenge. But the good news is, in some of these communities where these buildings are being torn down to build higher density, sometimes the building owner, but more often the local preservation group, is really saying, “No, this mosaic has meant a lot to us, [we need to keep it.”]. And thankfully, Brian Worley is the name of one of the members of the Sheets Studio who’s still live and active, and he knows how the [art] was installed, and he’s in a position to help uninstall them.
PCF: [for students and researchers of corporate patronage] What kind of skills and what should they start thinking about doing in terms of archives now?
AA: I think there is an opportunity to think outside of an established corporate archive. It is nice when they exist. And there are ways in which the archives at JPMorgan Chase, Ahmanson Foundation, and Fieldstead Company helped this project, but a lot of the work was done by going and looking at the buildings and looking for details, looking for cornerstones, looking for names, reading newspaper clippings. Some of these buildings when they opened, they were news. And so there were newspaper articles about the opening of these buildings. I could find names that way, figuring out who worked there, even people who had low-level jobs, like high school students working part time. They at least have the memory of stuff that goes back to the 50s and 60s. I was able to learn about their managers and how they were trained. And some of them had kept all kinds of materials that they had had from that period. The memos that I had from Howard Ahmanson were held by somebody who oversaw the printing, oversaw calendars, and photographs. He had all these memos from Howard Ahmanson from the early 60s saying, “This is what I want. This is what I don’t want.” And that was really my best opportunity to hear Ahmanson’s voice through these records because he tried so hard to hide his thinking about it. […] And if you find any name of somebody linked to the project, try to do a search for them and see if they have an archive as an architect or an artist.
[…] There are also all these other ways [into the project] because the community has its own memory of these things that, as something really becomes important to the community, it will appear in community letters or in newspapers and other ways that will tell you something about how the building or how the company was seen in its community.
[Interviewed recorded, edited, and broadcasted by Dr. Paula de la Cruz-Fernández]