Primary source brief
In August 1971, a corporate lawyer sent a private memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He wrote that American business was losing public support. He then gave a detailed plan to recover it. Two months later, the President nominated him to the Supreme Court.
The memo is a private plan for action. Powell wrote it for Eugene Sydnor, a friend who directed the education work of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber had asked Powell what business must do about its loss of public support.
Powell was not a politician. He was a senior partner in a law firm in Richmond, Virginia. He was also a past president of the American Bar Association, a Democrat, and a director of several corporations. One of these corporations was Philip Morris.
The memo has two parts. The first part says that the free enterprise system is under attack. The second part gives the plan, area by area.
Powell wrote that a small extreme group was not the source of the attack. The attack came from the universities, the churches, the media, the intellectual journals, and the politicians. Respectable people made it. That fact, Powell wrote, made the attack dangerous.
The most disquieting voices ... come from perfectly respectable elements of society. Lewis F. Powell, Jr., 23 August 1971
Between 1969 and 1971, the government created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It also passed the National Environmental Policy Act and made the Clean Air Act much stronger. A Republican president signed these measures. Each one gave a federal agency direct control over how a company operates. Business had seen no change of this speed since the 1930s.
Profits were under pressure, foreign competition was increasing, and inflation was high. On 15 August 1971, the President froze all wages and prices for ninety days. This was eight days before Powell wrote the memo. It was the first control of prices in American history outside a war. To business, it showed that even a friendly government would set the terms.
Powell named four men. Ralph Nader had made the safety of products a national issue. Powell called him the single most effective antagonist of American business. Charles Reich of Yale attacked the whole system in his book The Greening of America.
Herbert Marcuse taught a Marxist analysis of the system. William Kunstler defended the people who broke the law against it. To business, these were not marginal figures. They had large audiences and respectful coverage in the press.
Powell cited a survey of students. Almost half of them supported public ownership of the basic industries. The universities trained the next managers, lawyers, journalists, and officials. Business concluded that it was losing the next generation. It was losing that generation inside institutions that business itself helped to fund.
Business did not read these as four separate complaints. It read them as one connected attack on the system itself. Whether that reading was correct is a different question. It is what business believed in 1971. It is the belief that the memo acted on.
Business had no answer to the attack. Powell wrote that business made concessions, kept silent, and left the public argument to other people.
Powell's main practical point was about scale and time. One company alone could not change public opinion. Only national organizations could do it. They must act together, receive steady funds, and continue for many years.
Business had money and organizational skill. Powell wrote that it used almost none of these resources on the public argument.
Powell listed the areas of work and the method for each area. In his plan, the Chamber controls and coordinates the whole effort.
Employ a staff of scholars who defend the system. Ask the universities and their trustees for balance in the social science departments. Pay for speakers, and get them a place on the campus as a right.
Form panels of scholars. The panels examine the social science textbooks for bias. Civil rights groups and labor unions already used this method.
Use the same plan in the secondary schools. The national Chamber sets the standard. The local chambers do the work.
Monitor the television networks and the news programs continuously. If a program is unfair, make a complaint to the network and to the FCC. Demand equal time.
Get the scholars who support business to write continuously, in academic journals, in popular magazines, and in books. Their output must equal the output of the other side.
Spend part of the corporate advertising budget on the free enterprise system, and not on products. Powell suggested a minimum of ten percent.
Business must not be cautious about political power. It must use that power, support the politicians who agree with it, and penalize the politicians who do not.
Employ the best available lawyers. Use the courts as a planned method, with amicus briefs and selected cases. The ACLU and the labor unions already used this method. Powell wrote that the courts are possibly the most important instrument for social and economic change.
Organize the twenty million American stockholders into a political group. Use the company's own communications to reach them.
Powell sent the memo on 23 August 1971. On 21 October, President Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court. In December, the Senate confirmed him by 89 votes to 1. He took his seat in January 1972. Nobody disclosed the memo during the confirmation.
The columnist Jack Anderson then obtained a copy. He wrote about it on 28 and 29 September 1972. Powell had been a justice for eight months. Anderson wrote that a serving justice had made a plan for corporate America. The story did not continue. The public then forgot the memo for approximately thirty years.
Firms with registered lobbyists in Washington
1971 and 1982
Total reported federal lobbying spending
1998 to 2024, nominal dollars
Many writers describe the memo as the plan that created the modern conservative institutions. Other writers dispute this description. The dispute is not a party-political one. Writers on the left and on the right make the same objection.
The memo got little attention when Powell sent it. There is little evidence that the people who built the new institutions read it. The new organizations did not follow Powell's plan. Powell put the Chamber and the existing business bodies at the center, and not new institutes.
Powell himself was a corporate moderate. He named collective bargaining as one part of the free enterprise system. The historian Mark Schmitt writes that the memo returned to public view in approximately 2001, and that writers then made it into an origin story. To call it a blueprint, he writes, is a fiction. Conservative writers make the same objection for a different reason. The people who built these institutions already held these opinions, and did not need the memo.
Powell described the change before it happened, and he described it in detail. Business did almost all of his recommendations in fifteen years. It used the courts, monitored the media, funded the campuses, spent steadily on politics, and organized at a national level.
The value of the memo is therefore not that it started the change. Its value is that one short document states the plan clearly. Nobody else wrote the plan down.
People who argue for the influence of the memo point to one chart above all. Pay and productivity rose together until the 1970s. They then separated, and the gap has grown since.
Productivity and typical worker pay
Index, 1948 = 100
The chart shows that the two measures separated. It does not show why. Other causes are proposed for the same period: the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil shock of 1973, the fall in union membership, foreign competition, and technology. Economists also dispute the size of the gap, because the two measures use different price adjustments. The chart is evidence in the argument. It is not a conclusion.
The full text is short. The Washington and Lee University School of Law holds Powell's papers and publishes the text. Read the original. It is clear and specific.