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Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (American Business, Politics, and Society) Paperback – November 16, 2018
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During World War II, the United States helped vanquish the Axis powers by converting its enormous economic capacities into military might. Producing nearly two-thirds of all the munitions used by Allied forces, American industry became what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "the arsenal of democracy." Crucial in this effort were business leaders. Some of these captains of industry went to Washington to coordinate the mobilization, while others led their companies to churn out weapons. In this way, the private sector won the war—or so the story goes.
Based on new research in business and military archives, Destructive Creation shows that the enormous mobilization effort relied not only on the capacities of private companies but also on massive public investment and robust government regulation. This public-private partnership involved plenty of government-business cooperation, but it also generated antagonism in the American business community that had lasting repercussions for American politics. Many business leaders, still engaged in political battles against the New Deal, regarded the wartime government as an overreaching regulator and a threatening rival. In response, they mounted an aggressive campaign that touted the achievements of for-profit firms while dismissing the value of public-sector contributions. This probusiness story about mobilization was a political success, not just during the war, but afterward, as it shaped reconversion policy and the transformation of the American military-industrial complex.
Offering a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of the "arsenal of democracy," Destructive Creation also suggests how the struggle to define its heroes and villains has continued to shape economic and political development to the present day.
- Print length392 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania Press
- Publication dateNovember 16, 2018
- Dimensions5.25 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100812224310
- ISBN-13978-0812224313
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A masterful history of the World War II mobilization effort. Deeply researched, this book synthesizes, military, business, and political history in a well-written account of a war that is often oversimplified. Wilson's account should inform future histories of World War II-and perhaps reignite debates over the relative merits of public versus private enterprise." ― Journal of Military History
"It is an extraordinarily valuable and careful monograph that explains what works, and why we believe untrue stories about effective mobilization for war, and other crises." ― Business History Review
"Mark R. Wilson has made an outstanding contribution to the historical debate about U.S. industrial mobilization in World War II. Destructive Creation focuses on the substantial but largely ignored public sector contribution to the industrial war effort and argues that overemphasizing the role of the private sector and the relative neglect of the public sector in the historical literature has distorted our understanding of that wartime production miracle." ― Journal of American History
"Destructive Creation is essential reading for economic historians interested in WWII and for learning the lessons of history most relevant to ongoing debates over the military-industrial complex of the twenty-first century." ― Journal of Economic History
"Wilson's book is hard hitting, but balanced, detailed without being pedantic, and eminently stimulating." ― Defense Acquisition Research Journal
"Destructive Creation is a probing account of the World War II mobilization effort that sheds new light on the sources of big business hostility to government regulation. As Mark Wilson demonstrates in absorbing detail, it was the very success of the wartime state that generated such a furious business backlash. This is revisionist history in the most provocative and illuminating sense." ― Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara
"An outstanding reinterpretation of the role of business in the war effort, this volume is a must read for anyone who wants to understand World War II and the world of private contractors that has come to define our modern military." ― Meg Jacobs, author of Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America
"Destructive Creation is a truly important, impressive, and extraordinary history of the mobilization of the United States' economy during the Second World War, with a number of fascinating implications for our understanding of the interactions between business, politics, and American society. Mark R. Wilson makes a compelling case for placing the relationship between the military and business at the center of how we think about modern American history." ― Jason Scott Smith, University of New Mexico
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
World War II was won not just by brave soldiers and sailors but also by mountains of matériel. This was true even in times and places where guts were at a premium, as during the Allied invasion of Normandy, in June 1944. On D-Day and in the days that followed, American GIs and their British and Canadian counterparts were sometimes disappointed (and killed) by their own machines, too many of which sank below the waves, missed their targets, or otherwise failed to work as advertised. Even so, the soldiers preparing to land on the Normandy beaches could not help but be overawed—and deafened—by the firepower assembled to support them. In the skies just ahead, they saw hundreds of military aircraft, which, on the morning of 6 June alone, dropped thousands of high-explosive bombs. Behind them in the English Channel floated more than a hundred hulking warships, their big guns close to overheating from their constant shelling of German positions on the shore. Along with the naval vessels, the soldiers could also see a fleet of hundreds of cargo ships and landing craft, stretching to the horizon. These vessels, by the end of the two weeks starting with D-Day, would deliver to the Normandy beaches nearly 94,000 vehicles and over 245,000 tons of equipment and supplies, along with nearly 620,000 men. Here was the beginning of the end for the German armies, which, in the weeks to come, would be overwhelmed by the speed and power of Allied forces.
D-Day was truly an Allied operation, in which Britain (and Canada) provided much of the equipment and manpower. Yet even in a battle that took place just a hundred miles from England, one of the world's great industrial nations, it was obvious how much the Allied war effort depended on the economic output of the United States. The skies above Normandy buzzed with the bombers of the Eighth Air Force and Ninth Air Force: B-17 Flying Fortresses, B-24 Liberators, and B-26 Marauders (among other aircraft), made in Seattle, San Diego, and Baltimore. Many of the GIs who struggled ashore at Omaha Beach owed their lives to the sailors manning the five-inch guns of a whole group of the U.S. Navy's Gleaves-class destroyers, sitting in shallow waters just behind them. Those destroyers had been built during the early months of the war, in places such as Norfolk, Newark, and Seattle. At Omaha Beach and elsewhere, soldiers went ashore in small landing craft, built largely in New Orleans. Once they landed, the Allied armies relied on thousands of Sherman tanks, two-and-a-half-ton trucks, and jeeps, most of which were made in Toledo and Detroit. These tanks and trucks were disgorged by the score at Normandy by a fleet of some 230 tank landing ships (LSTs), the biggest of the Allied landing vessels, most of which were constructed in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and southern Indiana. And most of the fuel for the Army vehicles, along with most of the high-octane gasoline guzzled by Allied aircraft, came from the United States, as did most of the aluminum and steel used to make the planes, ships, tanks, and trucks.
Normandy was an exceptional military operation, but its reliance on American-made machines and matériel was part of a broader pattern of Allied war-fighting. During World War II, the United States helped vanquish the Axis powers by converting its enormous economic capacities into military power. By producing nearly two-thirds of all the munitions used by Allied forces—including huge numbers of aircraft, ships, tanks, trucks, rifles, artillery shells, and bombs—American industry became what President Franklin D. Roosevelt once called "the arsenal of democracy," providing the foundations for a decisive victory.
So the U.S. military-industrial mobilization for World War II worked well, or at least well enough. But how exactly did it work? How were all those bombers, ships, and planes produced, in such short order, under the pressures of a war emergency? And how was the mobilization related to broader, longer-run political and economic developments? What lessons should we take from its history? Seven decades after the end of World War II, we still lack good answers to these questions.
Since the 1940s, most accounts of the U.S. industrial mobilization for World War II have emphasized one of two stories. The first is a tale of the patriotic contributions of American business leaders and their companies. This account of the war contains a large element of truth. Private companies—including those led by remarkable wartime entrepreneurs such as the shipbuilder Henry Kaiser, as well as large manufacturing corporations like General Motors—did indeed shoulder the burden of munitions production. Many business leaders threw themselves into the work, with impressive results.
The second account tells a far more critical story about American business leaders. Indeed, it claims that big industrial corporations exploited the war emergency, to regain political power and reap economic gains. This story emphasizes the activities of corporate executives who went to Washington to run the war economy, in special civilian mobilization agencies such as the Office of Production Management and its successor, the War Production Board. Using their new foothold, so the story goes, the big corporations allied themselves with a conservative military establishment to thwart smaller firms, New Dealers, consumers, workers, and other citizens. According to this account, big business enjoyed huge wartime profits, thanks to an abundance of no-risk, cost-plus military contracts, which evidently prefigured the Cold War-era "military-industrial complex."
Despite their differences, these two accounts share a tendency to ignore, or disdain, the role of the public sector, including the work of the men and women who staffed powerful military and civilian governmental agencies. In the stories that celebrate the wartime achievements of American capitalism, the main characters are for-profit firms and their executives, some of whom took temporary jobs in government to help win the war. These same executives also figure prominently, albeit as villains, in the anticorporate version of events. That story is ultimately no less disparaging of civilian governmental and military authorities, because most of those public officials are presented as the handmaidens of big business.
This book shows that the military-industrial juggernaut of the early 1940s relied heavily on public investment, public management of industrial supply chains, and robust regulation. These powerful state actions shaped the dynamics of political struggle on the World War II home front. Wartime government-business relations were often antagonistic. Many business leaders regarded the wartime state as an annoyance: an imposing, overreaching regulator, as well as a threatening rival. They said so, openly, throughout the war. Their protests included aggressive, coordinated public-relations efforts, which played up the achievements of the private sector while dismissing the value of public contributions to the war economy. This pro-business framing effort was never uncontested, but it proved remarkably successful during World War II—and long after.
This book builds on a third, loosely woven and overlooked set of studies, which have called attention to the importance of public finance, military administration, and government enterprise on the American home front. Drawing on new research in a great deal of previously underused evidence, including the archival records of leading military contractors and U.S. military bureaus, this book calls our attention to important but poorly remembered actors. Like many previous studies, this one includes characters such as William Knudsen, Donald Nelson, Henry Kaiser, and the War Production Board. But it also describes the work of less familiar individuals and agencies, such as the Army Air Forces' Materiel Command (based at Wright Field, in Ohio); military "price adjustment" boards; and plant seizure teams, led by career military officers such as Admiral Harold G. Bowen. It also considers a variety of important war contractors, including midsize and larger companies in several industries, along with some of the era's most politically active business executives. Many of the latter, including Frederick C. Crawford and J. Howard Pew, joined the ranks of top military contractors in the early 1940s, despite their deep distrust of the federal government.
Following the activities of this diverse cast of characters, this book weaves together two stories about "destructive creation." During the early part of World War II, the economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase "creative destruction" to refer to the dynamism of capitalist economies, in which entrepreneurs created economic growth, even as they caused painful disruptions. Schumpeter did not use the phrase to refer specifically to the U.S. war mobilization, about which he knew little. But he presented it at a moment in which the U.S. economy was being transformed into a generator of devastating military power. Here was what might be called a "destructive creation," in which a giant capitalist economy was harnessed for the purpose of annihilating its enemies.
Successful conversion of the U.S. economy into an agent of "destructive creation" owed as much to socialism as it did to capitalism. To be sure, the American war economy relied on private-sector capacities, allowed for profits, and involved some competition among private firms. But it was also a war economy full of state enterprise and ramped-up regulation. The government paid for, and owned, acres of new industrial plant; it managed complex supply chains. It collected huge amounts of information about its contractors' costs and business operations, which helped it to strictly control prices and profits. It even seized the facilities of several dozen companies, including those led by executives who flouted federal labor law.
Remembering this public management and regulation of the industrial mobilization for World War II illuminates the history of modern conservative politics. Contrary to common belief, the war did not suspend politics as usual. In fact, the business community continued the energetic public-relations effort begun in the 1930s to counter the New Deal. During World War II, business leaders expanded that antistatist political effort, adjusting it to take account of new circumstances. As more and more firms and executives experienced the heavy hand of wartime state regulation, the business community and its political allies gained solidarity and strength. Executives from "big business" and the leaders of midsize and smaller firms, across many industries, joined together to resist government encroachment during wartime and—perhaps more important—to create a postwar future in which state enterprise and regulation would play a smaller part. Business leaders' political energy and unity, far from weakened by the stresses of war or patriotic duty, seem to have been bolstered by their common encounter with a formidable wartime state. This hardly made them all-powerful in the political arena but did leave them well positioned, after 1945, to continue to reverse the setbacks that they had experienced in the 1930s.
During and after the war, the business community was remarkably successful in framing the lessons of the military-industrial mobilization. According to business leaders, only for-profit enterprises made positive contributions to the production "miracle" of the early 1940s. This story, which was substantially destructive of the truth, contributed to a longer-running strain of American political discourse, which has disparaged governmental actors, condemned labor unions, and celebrated private enterprise. The history of the political struggles of the World War II era suggests the inadequacy of depictions of a static mid-twentieth-century liberal "consensus" or New Deal "order." Conservative business leaders in the 1940s saw themselves as engaged in a long war against excessive government regulation. From their point of view, the battle to frame the political lessons of the nation's economic mobilization for the biggest war in history seemed like a significant one, even if it might not offer any sort of immediate, wholesale triumph in the larger war.
Transformations in the military-industrial sector shaped American political and economic development. Starting in the 1940s, the American military economy swung toward privatization. By the mid-1960s, much of the government-controlled weapons production and design capacity, which had existed in the United States since the early nineteenth century, had been shed. This was no small achievement for the champions of free enterprise—especially during the early Cold War, when the military accounted for the majority of all national governmental expenditures. The oft-discussed rise of deregulation and privatization that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s was preceded, and then accompanied, by an equally significant shift in the military-industrial field.
By the end of the twentieth century, many American leaders had accepted conservative myths about wartime industrial mobilization. Their own defense policies relied heavily on free markets and private contractors, while neglecting targeted public investment, state enterprise, and regulation of prices and profits. This policy orientation, which extended well beyond the defense sector, evidently allowed for plenty of technological innovation and economic growth. However, it is far from clear whether it has provided the United States, or the world, with optimal or even adequate solutions to many of the more pressing problems of the day. In the future, as some of those problems develop into more acute crises, there may be more interest in reviewing what we have learned from the history of the American response to the challenge of World War II. Such an exercise in lessons-learned history, should it be undertaken, may be unsettling, for it will be hard not to conclude that today's domestic and global political economy has been shaped by a misreading of the past.
Product details
- Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press; Reprint edition (November 16, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 392 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0812224310
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812224313
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,120,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,712 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- #2,405 in Economic History (Books)
- #10,608 in World War II History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Mark R. Wilson is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research explores the history of U.S. war mobilizations, and the development of military-industrial relations, from the 19th century to the present day.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2021This is an exceedingly balanced study of the industrial mobilization in the U.S. during World War II. It neither extols nor demonizes the captains of industry, who often fought against government rules and ownership, but in the end, they produced the weapons of war that won the conflict. Yet government oversight was also necessary, and the military had to supplement American private industry to fully arm the nation. Any serious study of American national security must include a thorough examination of how the military acquires the weapons of war, and for World War II, this study is the benchmark.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2020This is an excellent book on the industrial mobilization of the US economy in World War II. It especially describes the sometimes tense relationships between private industrial companies and government regulators, the War Production Board (WPB), the Office of Price Administration (OPA), and program managers in the Army, Navy, and the Maritime Commission.
The book also describes the immense involvement of the Federal government in the US industrial and manufacturing economy during the War. At the end of the war in 1945, the US government owned 20% of the entire industrial and manufacturing plant in the country. Some specific examples are:
• Enriched uranium and plutonium processing : 100%;
• Synthetic rubber: 97%;
• Aircraft production: 89%;
• Ships: 87%;
• Non-ferrous metals (aluminum and magnesium): 58%;
• Chemicals and explosives: 43%;
• Aviation gasoline: 33%.
These plants were divided into government owned / Contractor operated (GOCO) and government owned government operated (GOGO). The book describes the immense propaganda effort put forth by private companies and assorted politically conservative organizations to make it seem like the private companies were winning the production war when that was definitely not the case. Furthermore, the industrial facilities directly managed by the government (usually by the Army or the Navy) were very efficient in their productivity.
Some other very good books on the US military – industrial economy during WW II are:
• “A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II” by Klein (2013). This is an outstanding, thorough book on the way by which the US economy was mobilized for WW II. Most of the discussion is on the various federal government agencies and personalities that coordinated the effort. It's definitely a Big Government point of view. It describes the successes and failures, the efficiencies and mis-coordinations, the warts and the shining moments. It also describes the good and ill contributions of labor unions and big business.
• “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II” by Herman (2012). This is an excellent book describing the role of American business in the military-industrial production efforts of WW II. In my opinion, it is a bit over the top in its praise. Don't get me wrong -- I think the US industry was far and away the most efficient of all the countries involved in the war. All that effort was coordinated by (gasp!) the Federal government. The horde of companies and factories didn't coordinate and administer themselves and didn't set production priorities on their own.
A good book on the various national wartime economies of all the powers is “The Economies of World War II” by Harrison (1998). It's on par with books by Tooze and Overy on this subject. And what's nice is that it compares the military industrial economies of all six major powers: USA, Great Britain, USSR, Germany, Japan, and Italy.
Some very good books on other nations’ wartime economies are:
Germany:
• “The Wages of Destruction” by Tooze (2008). This is the ultimate book on the war economy of the Third Reich.
• “Design for Total War” by Carroll (1968). This is an excellent discussion of the German military industrial and economy before and during World War II. The book gives a thorough explanation of the organizational chaos that permeated the entire war industrial effort. I thought that Chapter X "How Warlike a War Economy" and Chapter XIII " Total War: the Prophecy Fulfilled" were the most interesting. Chapter XI "Mobilization, 1939: A War of Each Against All" describing the dysfunctional military and civilian organizations for war industry and economy and their collective inability to establish priorities is also fascinating if not astounding.
USSR:
• “The Soviet Economy and the Red Army 1930 – 1945” by Dunn (1995). This is an excellent book on the subject. I have seen that the material contained in it is used / cited in many other books on the development of Soviet armored forces and associated military industry. You can get much of the information contained in this book regarding tank development, army organization, and military industrialization from the following books at much lower prices, even buying all of them: "Stalin's Keys to Victory" and "Hitler's Nemesis" both by the same author as this book (Walter Dunn). I found several chapters in this book quite fascinating and containing much original information: Chapter 3 "Logistics" describes the very different supply organization and system used by the Soviets; Chapter 7 "Artillery", Chapter 8 "Anti - Tank Guns", Chapter 9 "The Railroads", and Chapter 10 "Motor Transport" contained information and points of view I had never read before.
• “Guns and Rubles: The Defense Industry in the Stalinist State” by Harrison (2008). This is a dry but interesting study of the development of the Soviet military industrial complex in the 1920s and 1930s. It describes the creation and evolution of the Ministries or Commissariats, main directorates, and the overall bureaucracy for managing the military industrial system. It also discusses the inefficiencies that were built into the system from the very beginning. It gives some idea of the frustrations that were experienced: for example, trying to build fairly complex monocoque metal airplanes with a labor force consisting largely of peasant workers two or three years removed from the fields, an inexperienced management trying to produce things with little or no control over its suppliers, and intense pressure from above to do the impossible with inadequate resources. The fascinating part of the story, I felt, was that the old Soviet Union started out from scratch and managed to create an arms industry in World War II that performed better than that of their German opponents. The nice thing about this book is that it is based on information obtained from Soviet archives opened for research in the 1980s and 1990s -- no ideological biases or semi - informed speculations here.
• “Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defense Burden 1940 – 1945” by Harrison (1996). This is a dry but detailed book with much statistical data on Soviet war production and industrial productivity.
Japan:
• “Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction” by Cohen (1949). This is the ultimate book on the Japanese economy from about 1930 to 1948. It discusses every aspect of the economy: steel, shipping and shipbuilding, aircraft, oil, chemicals and munitions, electric power, coal mining, agriculture, textiles, labor, finance both in text and in tabular data form. The book also compares the performance of the Japanese economy to the economies of the US, Britain, and Germany in terms both in absolute numbers and in terms of labor efficiency. The Japanese came out a distant third no matter now you look at it. I think this is the primary source of information on the Japanese war economy as I have seen it referenced frequently in other books.
• “Japan’s Economic Planning and Mobilization inn Wartime, 1930s – 1940s” by Miwa (2015). This is a fairly good book on the subject of Japanese economic mobilization before and during WW II but is marred by considerable text repetition (especially in Part I). There are, I believe, considerable issues with illogical statements and then purported conclusions. There is some discussion that the industrialization plans were almost all developed and administered by the Army. But the Army had almost no one who possessed any education or experience running factories or administering an economy at the national level. Civilians who had experience in running large factories and industrial businesses were not involved in developing these war industry mobilization plans or in administering them. Chapter 2 in Part I at least gives some hints of the totally superficial efforts in which the Japanese military engaged when attempting strategic military and economic planning. Page 118 contains the following statement: “…The Basic Outline of Operations stated that the Imperial Army, following the Basic National Defense Plan, must do its best to resolve disputes promptly through preemptive actions that involved Army-Navy cooperation.” This is a military – industrial operations Plan? This sort of thing is amateurish compared to what the US, Britain, USSR and even Germany developed for economic mobilization and for waging war.
Britain:
• “Britain’s War Machine” by Edgerton (2011). A little over the top in terms of presenting the idea that everything was wonderful about Britain's industrial effort regarding aircraft, tanks, ship building, and so forth. For a more balanced view on British tank design and manufacture (for example) see “Death by Design” by Peter Beale and “Blood, Sweat, and Arrogance” by Gordon Corrigan. None the less, it does present a good alternative to the traditional historical view that Germany was the ultimate technical and industrial leader in the war.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2023The book lays down the argument that the military - business relationships leading up to and durning World War II were tenuous at best. Very insightful for those interested in the topic of mobilization.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2021This is an excellent book for those interested in the industrial effort to win WWII. Others include War Lords of Washington by Bruce Catton, Arsenal of Democracy by Donald Nelson, The Arsenal of Democracy by A. J. Baime, Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman (anti-union parts are inaccurate), Forging the Military-Industrial Complex by Gregory Hooks and Wedemyer Reports by General Wedemyer.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2022Hi was hoping this to be about the building if airplanes, ships, and tanks. It is not.
This book covers all the government agencies and government actions used to create the factories that industry used.
About the only interesting thing was how many military-factory workers were repeatedly laid off, due to all these overlapping bureaucracies constantly changing their priorities. Crazy levels of Red Tape.
As a Veteran told me "from what I saw, the country that can afford the most waste, wins"
No I still have to find a book on the manufacturing miracle of WW2. Any recommendations?
- Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2016Great read, very informative and well researched with great detail Dr. Wilson explores the creation of the military industrial complex