In 1971, future United States Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell was alarmed. The forces he believed were threatening corporate America—consumer advocates, labor unions, environmentalists, and left-wing radicals—appeared to be gaining momentum. At the center of this movement was a 37-year-old legal crusader named Ralph Nader, whose name had become synonymous with holding corporations accountable. Nader wasn’t just a thorn in the side of big business—he was a bona fide celebrity. Whether he was suing General Motors for concealing auto defects or exposing deceptive advertising practices, Nader dominated headlines, shining a spotlight on corporate misconduct and government corruption.
Nader’s crusade for corporate accountability was capturing the public imagination. He was reshaping the national conversation about government oversight, and the media couldn’t get enough of him. That June, Esquire magazine featured Nader on its cover with the headline: “Ralph Nader can be the next President of the United States.”
For Powell, the breaking point came when Fortune magazine—a publication for the business elite—published a nine-page profile of Nader. To Powell, the Fortune piece confirmed his worst fears: Nader and his allies were no longer just an annoyance—they had become an existential threat to the free enterprise system. The anti-corporate movement was no longer a fringe cause; it was becoming mainstream.
So on August 23, 1971, Powell put pen to paper to reverse this dynamic, through an open letter to the business community. Marked “confidential,” the message was far more than a business proposal—it was a battle plan. Powell opened with urgent and stark language, framing the situation as nothing less than a crisis for American capitalism. “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack,” he wrote. He described a “shotgun attack” undermining public confidence in “capitalism” and “the profit system,” and singled out Ralph Nader as the most dangerous figure leading the charge. “Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader,” Powell declared, “who—thanks largely to the media—has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”
Powell identified the media as a critical front in this ideological battle. He argued that news outlets played a central role in shaping public opinion, and he urged businesses to monitor and counteract their influence. He singled out television as a particularly powerful medium but also emphasized the importance of infiltrating radio, scholarly journals, books, and even paid advertisements. He called for businesses to keep television “under constant surveillance” and to actively shape narratives favorable to the free enterprise system.
This document, which came to be known as the Powell Memo, wasn’t the work of a mild-mannered moderate. It was an urgent, enraged, and radical manifesto that would serve as a rallying cry for corporate America. Today, the memo is frequently referenced as a key turning point in modern politics.
Yet for all its importance, the Powell Memo remains omitted from the official history of this country. It is often dismissed as a kind of conspiracy theory—like some boogeyman manufactured by liberals desperate to explain their loss of power. Even when it does get mentioned, it can sound almost too outrageous to be real.
What’s more, the Powell Memo was written just a few months before Powell joined the Supreme Court. As a justice, Powell’s most visible contributions were in landmark cases about social issues like abortion, affirmative action, and the death penalty. He was often a swing vote, and his centrist leanings earned him praise from liberals who appreciated his pragmatic approach. But on issues of corporate rights and campaign finance laws, Powell’s positions were far from moderate. Decisions he participated in during his tenure on the court laid the groundwork for the increasing influence of money in politics, changes whose consequences became evident only decades later.
Powell later dismissed the memo as something he had written in his free time as a favor to a friend, claiming it had little impact. Yet its influence is undeniable. It played a key role in reshaping the balance of power in the United States, leaving a lasting impact on media, education, government policy, and most critically, the courts.
This was not a personal manifesto to file away and forget; it was a blueprint for action, aimed squarely at the corporate elite. With no intention of keeping the memo to himself, Powell handed it to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. From there, it quietly began circulating among the country’s most powerful business leaders.
In March 1973, the Chamber of Commerce’s Public Affairs Committee convened a three-day conference at Disney World’s Polynesian Resort billed as the first gathering of the “Task Force on the Powell Memorandum.”
The conference agenda mirrored the memo’s recommendations. Sessions focused on “enhancing the image of business,” strategies for political action, and creating a long-term framework to expand corporate influence—particularly how “the Chamber and business community can develop more political clout.”
To implement Powell’s multifaceted and expansive vision, the task force divided into subcommittees, each focused on a core tenet of the memo: education, communications, political action, and judicial action. They were encouraged to think big, with instructions to “blue sky” their ideas beyond the Powell Memo’s already ambitious scope. They recognized that this was a long game, requiring not just money but sustained, strategic planning.
By November 1974, the Committee on Business Overview—the permanent group born from the Powell Memo Task Force—had been hard at work for over a year, implementing the memo’s recommendations. The group was convening for the third of three key meetings that would shape this movement. This gathering took place in a more formal venue: the Chamber’s headquarters, within view of the White House.
The seating chart for the meeting reads like a who’s who of the burgeoning conservative power structure. Around the table sat William Baroody, president of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading conservative think tank; Barton Cummings, the bow tie–wearing chair of the Ad Council; and Gene Sydnor, the Richmond businessman who first persuaded Powell to draft his memo. Executives from CBS, Amway, and General Motors were joined by representatives from the National Association of Manufacturers, the Council of Better Business Bureaus, and the newly formed Business Roundtable, a coalition of CEOs. Together, these groups would go on to define a new power structure on Capitol Hill.
The task force had launched a series of educational initiatives, including new lesson plans for teachers, multimedia kits on profits and productivity, and pilot television programs like Everybody Knows What Profit Is. The Chamber’s media outreach now extended to weekly columns sent to hundreds of newspapers, public-service announcements on radio stations, and cable TV features reaching millions. Even as these achievements were touted, the emcee, a U.S. Steel lobbyist, reminded the room that much more work lay ahead. In that spirit, advertising executive Cummings reported that “field work” was underway on a multi-million-dollar national public service announcement campaign to promote public “support of the American enterprise system.”
The campaign Cummings teased at the 1974 meeting was one of the most ambitious and far-reaching initiatives to come out of the Chamber’s efforts. Known for wholesome campaigns like Smokey the Bear, the Ad Council teamed up with President Ford’s Commerce Department to counter rising public discontent over inflation, big business, and broader unease with the structure of the economy.
Funded by millions from corporate giants like Mobil Oil, Procter & Gamble, and U.S. Steel, the “American Economic System” campaign echoed the very ideas in the Powell Memo. The heart of the campaign was booklets illustrated with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters, which placed the logic of business and capitalism at the core of American government and identity. The nationwide rollout also included billboards, magazine ads, and radio spots. One radio ad asked, “Architect Delores Gould, what’s your IQ?” When Gould answered “138,” the narrator quipped, “And your EQ? Your economics quotient?” The ad concluded with Gould admitting, “Oh, I don’t know much about economics.”
Another television spot featured a fumbling businessman unable to explain how the American economic system worked. The interviewer pressed him: “Who makes the American economic system work?” The businessman stammered, “Well, uh-uh… I don’t know.” The interviewer shot back, “Right. And that’s a problem.”
Over its four-year run in the late 1970s, at least 14 million booklets were distributed to the American public, Cummings later recalled. The Ad Council went on to tout its campaign to reshape public opinion about free-market capitalism as “the most successful introduction of a public service campaign in Ad Council history,” even publishing a pamphlet that described the organization as “free enterprise’s effective communications machine.”
By the close of the 1970s, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had undergone a radical transformation. Once a cautious, business-friendly trade group, it had become a politically aggressive and ideologically driven machine, rebuilt to carry out the “careful long-range planning and implementation” urged in Lewis Powell’s memo. It had thrown out its old leadership, built an information pipeline to members, partnered with groups like the Business Roundtable, launched a legal arm to shape the courts, and embraced more aggressive tactics in Congress. Most importantly, it became part of the broader vision Powell had imagined: an alliance of business interests and conservative political groups, united in opposition to the regulatory state and working together as a social movement for capitalism.
This article has been adapted from David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher’s new book, Master Plan.