A U.S. Tripartite Experiment in the Kennedy Administration

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Seeing the United States as a model for laissez-faire economies discourages research on the distinctive features of the U.S. political economy. The conventional view is that the U.S. economy suffers from chronic coordination problems, in which market actors engage in arm’s-length transactional relationships. This article challenges such generalization by delving into an unexplored tripartite experiment conducted by Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s through the President’s Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy (LMAC). The experiment was a product of policy entrepreneurs’ attempts to tackle the decline of U.S. manufacturers’ market competitiveness and worsening labor-management relations, rather than being merely a negligible outlier of mainstream American liberalism. Given the absence of peak business and labor associations, these entrepreneurs designed the LMAC in a way that made it different from its European counterparts. Drawing from the literature on political entrepreneurship and creative syncretism in American political development, I describe where the tripartite experiment failed and how it paved the way toward industrial pluralism in a legal sense, and toward growth liberalism or reactionary Keynesianism in an economic sense. The article contributes to the burgeoning literature concerning various U.S. policy experiments to address problems in market coordination.