American Enterprise Association Moves to Washington to Oppose New Deal, Precursor to AEI Think Tank

The American Enterprise Association (AEA) moves its main offices from New York City to Washington, D.C. in 1943 to more effectively oppose the New Deal and capitalize on Congress’s need for help making sense of its vastly increased wartime portfolio. AEA was founded in 1938 by a group of New York businessmen led by Lewis H. Brown, president of Johns-Manville Corporation, along with economic writer Henry Hazlitt. The organization’s founders include executives from Bristol-Myers, Chemical Bank, Chrysler, Eli Lilly, General Mills, and Paine Webber, representing a cross-section of major American corporations. The group forms in response to congressional “talk of making wartime price and production controls permanent when the war ended to prevent another depression,” with Lewis Brown and fellow founders long distrusting the growing centralization of the American economy.

The acceleration of economic centralization during World War II prompts AEA to challenge New Deal policies more aggressively by relocating to the nation’s capital. Upon moving to Washington in 1943, the organization begins a series of legislative analyses producing brief surveys of 50 congressional bills each year, establishing the template for think tank policy analysis aimed at influencing legislation. AEA’s original mission is to promote “greater public knowledge and understanding of the social and economic advantages accruing to the American people through the maintenance of the system of free, competitive enterprise.” In its early years, the organization is generally viewed as more akin to an industry lobbying group than an institution with significant academic credentials, with its original objective being to advocate for the dissolution of wartime economic controls after World War II.

The 1943 move to Washington establishes AEA as one of the earliest corporate-funded policy organizations systematically working to influence federal legislation, predating the Powell Memo by 28 years. Lewis Brown dies in 1951 and AEA languishes until William J. Baroody Sr. joins in 1954 as executive vice president, beginning the transformation that will make it the American Enterprise Institute and one of the great conservative forces in Washington. The 1943 relocation demonstrates that corporate-funded think tank infrastructure designed to oppose progressive economic policy and promote “free enterprise” ideology was being built systematically well before the Powell Memo called for business to establish “staff of scholars” to develop positions and arguments. AEA’s early work opposing wartime price controls, the Office of Price Administration, and New Deal policies establishes the organizational model for Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and other Powell Memo-inspired institutions, proving that the architecture of ideological capture through corporate-funded policy research was already under construction during World War II.