“An Owner’s Sense of Interest”: The Ethics of Socially Responsible Investing

At the very moment that the NYSE’s mass-investment programs were beginning to stutter, a different program of popular finance was in the process of formation. A function, in some important ways, of the social disruptions of the moment, socially-responsible investing (SRI) emerged in the early 1970s as an attempt to frame the ownership of corporate stock within the political lexicon of the civil rights struggle and other “new social movements.” It was the inescapable shadow of war, however, and the American intervention in Vietnam, that formed the most immediate crucible in which SRI began to enunciate an ambitious, if fledgling, attempt not only at a particular vision of popular finance but also at a connection between “everyday” investment and an explicitly ethical practice. Concerned in particular with the countless ways in which everyday investors were implicated in the war, and the corporations that benefited from it, SRI advocates began to sketch out a domain in which everyday investment and progressive, even antiwar, politics could be stitched together. In early August 1971, for example, at a moment deeply marked by conflict and debate over the war, Luther Tyson and Elliot Corbett, two figures connected to the United Methodist Church, launched Pax World Funds, the first publicly available mutual fund that explicitly avoided investments in firms connected to or profiting from the misadventure in Vietnam.