In the 1920s innovative employment policies, and the institutional changes within the MMA that accompanied and facilitated them, resulted from local, private initiatives by the association and those of its member companies that gave its managerial progressivism their support. The only important outside forces that impinged on it were the cosmopolitan communities of businessmen and social scientists who devised and implemented the progressive agenda and the national corporations, G.E. and Westinghouse, whose local managers lent it their assistance. What businessmen and their allies did was all that mattered; public policy rarely affected their decision making. They could take their political environment more or less for granted – a distant, inactive federal government, whose rare interventions supported the progressives' programs; a state government of similar character; and a city government on whose help they could utterly rely, whether for vocational education or, if necessary, policing strikes. The labor movement almost vanished from view; workers figured only as a mass of disconnected individuals with sometimes awkward behavior, particularly the tendency to move from job to job.

But, in the 1930s, this cozy world turned upside down. What mattered about the thirties was what other people and institutions did, and how businessmen responded. They were battered, as never before or since, by forces that were national or even international in scope – the Depression, the development of interventionist governments and a pluralistic polity, and the rise of working-class militancy and of new forms of working-class action and organization.