Writing in 2018 — at possibly, or perhaps hopefully, the zenith of the reformist social revolution that has remolded American institutions over the past decade — New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posed a wistful counterfactual to the decline of the WASP establishment, speculating about how they might have kept “piety and discipline embedded in the culture of a place like Harvard, rather than the mix of performative self-righteousness and raw ambition that replaced them.”
Although Harvard is, by default, near the center of any discussion about the ethos of the American elite, his invocation of it now seems prescient considering the recent ouster of the university’s president, Claudine Gay, for failing to abide by its barest academic standards. For all the nuclear-grade soporific folderol that surrounds the role of vaguely defined social forces such as “wokeness” or racism in Gay’s firing, the episode resurfaces an extremely basic question at the heart of American identity: What kind of person is fit to rule us?
In The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. and the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age, author Ralph Watson McElvenny, with co-writer Marc Wortman, provides a simple answer: his grandfather.
OK, it’s a bit more complicated than that. McElvenny, the son of Watson’s daughter Jeannette, enlists the journalist and historian Wortman to assist him in painting a portrait of the seeming über-WASP, a silver-haired midcentury business titan who rubbed elbows with presidents and potentates, sailed and skied his way across the globe, and left a deep personal imprint on the company that defined 20th-century computing.
Hagiographic as the book might inevitably be, it does present a perhaps unintentionally sophisticated portrait of how the beliefs and preferences of American elites are formed, a strange hydra of inspirational C-suite biography, technological history, and Balzacian social portraiture. For Watson was not your textbook WASP. Rather than an unbroken chain of sons and daughters of the Revolution, he was the progeny of a self-made man of the Gilded Age, a former traveling salesman who swore off alcohol (and later, Ford-like, forbid IBM employees from its consumption) after his horse, buggy, and wares were stolen during a bender at a saloon.
Watson Sr., here referred to as T.J., was a quintessential only-in-America entrepreneur, transforming IBM from a record-keeping firm on life support to a prewar tech dynamo through sheer force of will (and a few borderline-monopolistic business practices). He plastered the walls of IBM offices with portraits of himself and quite literally forced his employees to sing his praises, as McElvenny and Wortman quote from the “Songs of the IBM” hymnal with a not-quite-bemused detachment (“The name of T.J. Watson means a courage none can stem / And we feel honored to be here to toast the IBM”). This gauche self-regard and overweening paternalism revolted the young Watson Jr., who raged against his father and flamed out of a perfunctory effort as an IBM salesman.
Luckily for Watson, a morally reformative experience was right around the corner in World War II. Watson served as an aide-de-camp for Maj. Gen. Follett Bradley, who directed the U.S. lend-lease program to Soviet Russia, helping to turn the tide on the Eastern front. Although Watson’s name surely helped ensure he wasn’t directly in the line of Nazi fire, he couldn’t lean on it, for example, to configure a 56,000-pound bomber for a safe air trek from Siberia to Nome or pilot it across the Atlantic with no gauges or navigation. In McElvenny and Wortman’s telling, Watson’s war experience gave him both confidence and a procedural competence he previously lacked and sparked a lifelong interest in Soviet affairs that would culminate in a short stint as President Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Upon returning from the war, Watson put those newfound qualities to use in climbing the IBM corporate ladder, in which he rebelled against his father by embodying the modest, austere values of the WASP establishment of which, although he shared its inherited wealth, he was decidedly not part. He succeeded his father as IBM’s president in the early 1950s, and the gilded portraits came down. He aggressively cut his own pay in the style of WASP paragon and fellow postwar business-do-gooder George Romney, something Watson’s father would never have even considered. The IBM songbooks were closed.
The book’s narrative hinges on the risky but ultimately successful rollout of the System/360 line of mainframe computers, which the authors note has been cited as one of the most successful product launches of all time, along with the Model T and Boeing’s 707. They admit Watson’s shortcomings — a depressive, unpredictable temper, a troubled family life, and a fumbled planning of his own succession that led to major stumbles for IBM in the 1990s — but the book’s tone is ultimately reverent, deeply respectful, and even defensive. The latter is most readily apparent in their refutation of claims from the author Edwin Black that IBM technology directly enabled the Holocaust. McElvenny and Wortman note that both the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and historians of the census have said Black’s most maximal claims are technologically impossible.
In a personal epilogue, McElvenny makes an argument that echoes Douthat: If Watson, or at least someone sharing his ethos, had kept his hand on the wheel at IBM, the firm might have maintained its status as one of the world’s leading technology companies instead of ceding it to successors like Microsoft or Google. “He would likely have consulted the smartest people he could find, gotten management consensus, built loyalty from the bottom up, and with another bold 360-type bet or bets, ensured IBM stayed on top at the forefront,” he writes. In other words, if my grandpa had been there, it wouldn’t have gone down like it did.
It’s impossible to prove McElvenny’s counterfactual, but one doesn’t have to look far for examples of today’s leaders’ shortcomings. The heads of our current tech behemoths reap profits that would have been unimaginable, and likely unseemly, to Watson by churning out products and services that amount to little more than distraction or make-work engines. Elon Musk, the closest cousin to the kind of personalized rule and dynamic risk-taking the Watsons embodied, hardly shares their sense of social responsibility, whether embodied as Watson Sr.’s fogey-ish paternalism or Jr.’s civic-minded noblesse oblige.
And then there’s the rest of the establishment, encompassing politics and academia. McElvenny’s book closes with the charmingly out-of-fashion assertion that Watson’s “greatest legacy was showing that there is no conflict between what I would call humane capitalism and profit.” Intentionally or not, it echoes David Leonhardt’s call for a more “democratic capitalism” in his recent book Ours Was the Shining Future, seeking a middle ground between rapacious venture capitalism and the de rigeur techno-pessimism of writers like the historian Jill Lepore — whose 2020 dystopian history If Then placed IBM near, if not at, the origin of America’s modern ills, never mind the fact that the Watsons were uncharacteristically staunch liberals for their class, pioneering industrial desegregation and combating McCarthyism and nuclear proliferation.
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Ironically, that hubristic certainty about the root causes of American dysfunction mirrors the vices of which Watson and his generation stand accused by their modern critics. Oppressive, top-down governance; an insular set of social rituals and expectations whose violation merits censure or exile; fetishization of meritocratic credentials: What else, if anything, could Claudine Gay and her defenders share with their imagined Watsons, or Bushes, or Rockefellers? The writer Helen Andrews argued in a 2016 essay that the current generation of progressive elites is inherently stymied in their capacity to rule fairly by their very political beliefs, that is to say, their refusal to admit that they are rulers.
In telling his grandfather’s story, McElvenny and Wortman have, at the very least, unearthed an example of the material, nonsymbolic victories that might be achieved once that admission is made.
Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.
