Apostles for Capitalism: Amway, Movement Conservatism, and the Remaking of the American Economy, 1959-2009
Abstract
This dissertation examines the Amway Corporation, the world’s largest multi-level marketing company. Since its inception, Amway has purported to offer individuals the ability to go into business for themselves and to participate in free enterprise through direct sales. At the same time, many have attacked Amway as a fraudulent pyramid scheme that trades in false promises and leaves its distributors financially and psychologically worse off than before they joined. In addition to running the company for over three decades, Amway’s cofounders, Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel, along with members of their families, have been influential players in the Republican Party and movement conservatism going back to the 1970s.
Amway draws our attention to important subtleties in the post-World War II conservative movement. DeVos and Van Andel were prominent avatars of an ideology known as small-business conservatism. Like other champions of free enterprise, small-business conservatives attacked “big government,” but they additionally articulated a critique of corporate capitalism. Amway promoted an economic model known as “compassionate capitalism,” which was premised on the liberating potential of individual proprietorship. Amway also widens the geographic lens of the modern Right, highlighting the role that parts of the American North played in cultivating conservatism. Western Michigan, where DeVos and Van Andel were born and raised, has a long conservative tradition dating back to the mid-nineteenth century and shaped to a large degree by the region’s Dutch-American community, which practiced a particularly conservative strain of Calvinism. DeVos and Van Andel have had a hand in many of the key moments in the history of American Right over the last four decades, underscoring the importance of Grand Rapids to the conservative movement.
Compassionate Capitalism: Amway and the Role of Small-Business Conservatives in the New Right
Modern American History, Volume 1 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 343 – 361
Abstract
This article examines the Amway Corporation, one of the largest direct sales companies in the world, and its founders, Republican kingmakers Richard DeVos and Jay Van Andel. It argues that Amway and its cofounders embodied small-business conservatism, an ideology that simultaneously critiqued government largesse and corporate capitalism, viewing both as threats to individual freedom. Beginning in the 1970s, DeVos and Van Andel became involved in the conservative effort to promote free enterprise and roll back government. At the same time, Amway and its allies presented direct sales as a more rewarding and liberating alternative to traditional, nine-to-five employment. This history highlights the important role that small-business conservatives played in the Right’s campaign against the New Deal state between the 1930s and the 1980s.