This article documents how business lobbying groups, corporate leaders, and even some members of the Nixon administration drew on futurist discourse and rhetoric to defeat the Burke-Hartke bill, proposed legislation that would have imposed new taxes on multinational corporations. For several years, self-described futurologists had reconceptualized multinational corporations as ideal institutions for securing world peace and, more broadly, meeting society’s needs, thereby taking over some of the government’s functions. These ideas allowed business interests to invoke a utopian vision of the multinational corporation while working toward the more concrete goal of building a global economy defined by free trade and fending off unwanted regulation.

This article examines the nationwide campaign by financial reformers in the 1910s to convince businesses across the United States to abandon established commercial credit practices and use trade acceptances—the quintessential “real bill”—in their stead. The creation of the Federal Reserve System (Fed) and the outbreak of World War I offered a powerful coalition of campaigners the opportunity to forcefully argue that by capitalizing open account credit, trade acceptances fostered good business practices and stabilized the banking and financial systems. These campaigners relied on trade associations to disseminate, and the federal government to legitimize, their message. While some firms obliged, many businesses and banks criticized the campaigners’ arguments, casting trade acceptances as a means of financial centralization and as being contrary to the American culture of credit. Trade acceptances did not supplant promissory notes or trade in the open market and were rarely used by banks to access Fed liquidity. Instead, their legacy lies in their adoption by finance companies in the hope of securing financing for the distribution and mass consumption of consumer durables.