AEI

The American Enterprise Association (AEA) arrived in Washington in 1943, in the thick of World War II. In Congress there was talk of making wartime price and production controls permanent to prevent another Depression when peace finally arrived. The tiny AEA, a business group formed in New York City in 1938, was horrified; it resolved to open a Washington office to advocate rapid postwar economic demobilization and, more generally, to improve Congress's understanding of the economic consequences of its actions. The new AEA office, which eventually became headquarters and graduated from "association" to "institute," was the avant-garde of two momentous developments of the decades to come, both responding to the growing size and power of the federal government: the migration of business and trade associations from commercial centers to the nation's capital and the emergence of the policy "think tank."